editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Wireless Power Progress: Efficiency and Distance

We met PowerByProxi recently when discussing wireless battery charging options. Well, they’ve recently announced what they claim to be a couple of milestones both in distance and charging power.

The distance metric has them able to charge in the “z” direction up to 30 mm away. That’s 3 cm; roughly an inch and a half. Which doesn’t actually seem that far, but, critically, since they can penetrate various construction materials, this means they can go through counters and tables (much as we discussed in the WiTricity case).

More significantly, they’ve upped their charging power to what they say is an industry-leading 7.5 W. Those of you who know phone power systems in detail may note that, at least as PowerByProxi tells it, the power management ICs (PMICs) throttle wireless charging power to 3.5 or 5 W to avoid overheating. (No such limit is placed on wired charging.)

Given that fact, you might wonder how PowerByProxi tested this out (short of designing their own PMIC): they did it by adding a dummy load to the phone to pull extra power. Their goal is that, by demonstrating 7.5-W charging (per receiver, or device being charged), future PMICs can eliminate the limit, allowing faster charging.

They also announced a “personal charger” in the shape of a bowl. This was a prototype demonstrating that phones or wearable gadgetry could be simply dropped into the bowl, without any careful positioning, and they would be properly charged.

They’re targeting this for the new Qi v1.2 protocol, which uses the lower-frequency 200 kHz range, even though PowerByProxi makes charging systems at other frequencies (they’re not firmly wedded to one format).

You can read more about their developments in their announcement.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Dec 1, 2023
Why is Design for Testability (DFT) crucial for VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design? Keeping testability in mind when developing a chip makes it simpler to find structural flaws in the chip and make necessary design corrections before the product is shipped to users. T...
Nov 27, 2023
See how we're harnessing generative AI throughout our suite of EDA tools with Synopsys.AI Copilot, the world's first GenAI capability for chip design.The post Meet Synopsys.ai Copilot, Industry's First GenAI Capability for Chip Design appeared first on Chip Design....
Nov 6, 2023
Suffice it to say that everyone and everything in these images was shot in-camera underwater, and that the results truly are haunting....

featured video

TDK CLT32 power inductors for ADAS and AD power management

Sponsored by TDK

Review the top 3 FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) regarding TDK’s CLT32 power inductors. Learn why these tiny power inductors address the most demanding reliability challenges of ADAS and AD power management.

Click here for more information

featured paper

Power and Performance Analysis of FIR Filters and FFTs on Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs

Sponsored by Intel

Learn about the Future of Intel Programmable Solutions Group at intel.com/leap. The power and performance efficiency of digital signal processing (DSP) workloads play a significant role in the evolution of modern-day technology. Compare benchmarks of finite impulse response (FIR) filters and fast Fourier transform (FFT) designs on Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs to publicly available results from AMD’s Versal* FPGAs and artificial intelligence engines.

Read more

featured chalk talk

Advantech Industrial AI Camera: Small but Mighty
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Advantech
Artificial intelligence equipped camera systems can be a great addition to a variety of industrial designs. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Ryan Chan from Advantech explore the components included in an industrial AI camera system, the benefits of Advantech’s AI ICAM-500 Industrial camera series and how you can get started using these solutions in your next industrial design. 
Aug 23, 2023
12,091 views