Energous and e-peas Create Wireless Charging Eval Board for Distances Greater than 1 Meter

More specifically, the wireless charging devices that they have designed for are ones that can do so from distances greater than one meter. This is done by pairing e-peas’s state of the art power management integrated circuit (PMIC) technology, with the radio frequency solutions of Energous. This evaluation board can find itself in a variety of applications, such as smart buildings, industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors, and retail electronic displays, just to name a few.

Image courtesy of e-peas. 

According to an e-peas press release, the evaluation board combines all of this technology:

• DA2210 WPT Rectifier
  • This is an Energous part that takes 4 RF inputs and converts it to 4 DC outputs that can each feed a DC-DC converter
  • This is a part of Energous’s WattUp system, which utilizes the design of small form factor wireless charging solutions that don’t even require a flat surface, which is a novel feat. More information on this WattUp system can be found here.
  • Product information can be found here.
• AEM30940 Harvesting PMIC
  • This part is from e-peas, and can simultaneously harvest energy from an RF source to charge a storage device (battery, supercapacitor, capacitor, etc.) while also outputting two precise voltage outputs from independent low-dropout voltage regulators (LDOs).
  • Product information can be found here.
  • This is not the first collaboration e-peas has had utilizing this part, it had another with TCT that we wrote about here!
• Support for a supercapacitor or battery
• Smartbond DA14531-based Bluetooth Low-Energy System-on-Chip (BLE SoC)
  • This part is a fully-integrated bluetooth solution, only requiring a power supply on a PCB to be used, 
  • Product brief can be found here.
• Light, temperature and humidity sensors
• Support for E-Ink display charging (optional)
• Support for an external harvesting antenna

Geoffroy Gosset, the CEO and co-founder of e-peas says” As the wireless sensors market grows, so too is the need for avoiding battery maintenance costs. That is why at-a-distance solutions capable of charging more than a meter away are critical.” He continues, stating: 

“We believe that the combination of both Energous’ WattUp and e-peas AEM technologies on a single evaluation board will ease the deployment of zero-maintenance solutions on multiple markets.” This is definitely true, as both companies have truly risen to the top of their respective markets, and the applications correspond with each other so well.

As our society continues to become “smarter” and thus increasingly integrated with technology, devices need to get smaller, and more efficient. As we have already discussed, Energous’s WattUp system is doing this, along with e-peas as their PMIC device delivers a fully integrated chip that requires only seven external parts to deliver two power supplies of 20mA @ 1.2/1.8V and 80mA @ 1.8V-4.1V, while also providing energy storage support with input powers as low as 3uW.

This evaluation board hits all of the major points required by wireless charging applications, being of small form factor, efficient, and having the capability of delivering power from over a meter away. With the potential that both of these companies’ expertise can give the power electronics industry, we hope that this is the beginning of great collaboration between them, to help propel our integrated society into the future.