For a company first established in 2003, the widespread adoption, development, and scale of wireless power has translated into rich opportunities for Powercast, which began with the aim of drawing on the energy harvesting technology in RFID tags and bringing it to radio frequency (RF) based wireless power transfer, which it now specialises in.
Magnetic resonance
With RF and inductive power already part of its portfolio, at CES Powercast announced a third addition: magnetic resonance. Why?
It comes down to the trade-offs in RF and inductive power charging, Eric Biel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Powercast explained: “RF has lots of range, but with very small amounts of power transferred. The furthest we’ve gone with our transmitter devices is about 40 metres, but at that distance, you’re getting microwatts of power. That application was a passive, battery-free temperature sensor.”
Whereas inductive power provides lots of power, but with low range. “Magnetic resonance splits the difference,” said Biel. “You can transfer significant amounts of power, upwards of 100 watts, but you’re getting some range … you can essentially put the coil on a table, and anywhere you slide the device on the table, six or 10 inches above, you’re still transferring enough power to charge a laptop or mice, keyboards, headphones.”
This is part of the company’s wider vision to become a “one-stop shop” for wireless power where it offers a complete range of solutions. Magnetic resonance is expected to be especially beneficial for consumer peripheral devices that sit on your desk at home, such as devices with high power demands like Bluetooth speakers or computer monitors.
The company operates in both industrial applications – such as temperature sensors, humidity sensors, occupancy sensors – and consumer, with devices like phones and headphones.
“The ultimate vision would be to have no power cords come into any of these devices, they’re just being charged from the different sources we offer,” explained Biel.
Trend towards battery-free operation
In one example of where Powercast has worked, Samsung’s SolarCell remote incorporated Powercast’s chip as part of a wider initiative to eliminate battery waste in landfill, by getting rid of the battery that previously powered the remote altogether.
“There were three different methods to charge that remote,” said Biel. “One of them was you could simply plug it in using USB C to top that supercapacitor off; another was a solar cell on the back of the remote that would use light sources to charge it; and then our chip was in there, harvesting ambient Wi-Fi or Bluetooth energy and converting it into DC power that can charge the supercapacitor as well.” This meant, in effect, when the remote was close to a Wi-Fi router or Bluetooth source, it would charge using any available energy.
The trend towards battery-free operated devices can be attributed to growing green-consciousness – although Biel noted he saw “battery waste always being a concern” – but also for convenience reasons, such as end users no longer having to carry charging for their respective devices’ cables when travelling.
In another example of where Powercast works that was exhibited at CES, a ‘smart cricket ball’ with over-the-air RF charging capabilities integrated the company’s RF technology but also represented a significant design challenge: “We made a charging cradle and put the electronics inside the cricket ball so it would measure things like spin, rate, velocity, impact.
“The problem was how you charged the ball. The challenge was, if you were to put coils in it to inductive charging, you’d throw the weight of the ball off, and one key parameter was that a professional [using it] shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
This custom approach to product design is something the company encounters in their day-to-day operations, Biel told me.
“The nature of the RF-based wireless power transfer is inherently interesting from product to product,” he said. “Every single thing we put our tech into is custom in some way. It’s not just a ‘drop this in’ [technology].”
Crystallising wireless power charging
However, the awareness around wireless power charging has fundamentally changed, and the questions the company is posed with have shifted from what do you do, to what can you do for my use case?
When we began the interview, Biel mentioned wireless charging pads for smartphones as a representation of what they do, to put it into a concrete example. “Customers get that. What blows their mind a lot of times is when we show them the RF-based stuff,” Biel explained, in reference to this mention.
“There’ll be a transmitter box sitting here, and I take a receiver that has a light on it, and I walk away, I’m 15-20 feet away, and the receiver’s still lighting up because I’m transferring that power through the air. That really sells it.”
Positioning the company as a “one-stop shop”, the continued integration of RF into consumer electronics and the rise of the magnetic resonance will all be key talking points for Powercast in 2025 and in the coming years, Biel said.
“Wireless power everywhere would be the goal for Powercast, but we’ll just keep working our way towards that like we’ve been doing since 2003.”
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