Wireless Power Eliminates Batteries for IoT Devices
What you'll learn:
- What is wireless power transmission?
- What are the capabilities of wireless-powered IoT devices?
- Why use wireless power?
IoT devices require power. This can be obtained via batteries, energy harvesting, or wireless power. In the video above, I talk with Giampaolo Marino, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Business Development at Energous, about this topic.
Energous provides wireless power transmitters like the EN-TXS-2000 PowerBridge (Fig. 1). It can supply power to any nearby devices that incorporate the company’s client chip or chip technology along with an antenna. Now this isn’t something that will drive a high-performance GPGPU and CPU combination, but it’s more than enough to run a low-power microcontroller. The amount of power is also sufficient to support wireless communication like Bluetooth.
One example of a low-power IoT device is Energous’ eSense Tag (Fig. 2). It’s a 4- × 5-cm, waterproof wireless sensor that includes a temperature sensor. Designed for tracking items, it communicates directly with the PowerBridge.
Another sensor with more robust characteristics is available from a partner, Wiliot. The company’s IoT Pixel incorporates a 1-MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ along with a Bluetooth radio (Fig. 3). It includes 128-bit AES encryption support, authentication support, and a true random number generator (TRNG).
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About the Author
William G. Wong
Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.
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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.
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