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
Jun 16, 2025
I recently ran across a very interesting website boasting 500+ reviews of books pertaining to time travel...

featured paper

Shift Left with Calibre Pattern Matching: Trust in design practices but verify early and frequently

Sponsored by Siemens Digital Industries Software

As integrated circuit (IC) designs become increasingly complex, early-stage verification is crucial to ensure productivity and quality in design processes. The "shift left" verification approach, enabled by Siemens’ Calibre nmPlatform, helps IC design teams to identify and resolve critical issues much earlier in the design cycle.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Wi-Fi Locationing: Nordic Chip-to-Cloud Solution
Location services enable businesses to gather valuable location data and deliver enhanced user experiences through the determination of a device's geographical position, leveraging specific hardware, software, and cloud services. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Finn Boetius from Nordic Semiconductor explore the benefits of location services, the challenges that WiFi based solutions can solve in this arena, and how you can take advantage of Nordic Semiconductor’s chip-to-cloud locationing expertise for your next design.
Aug 15, 2024
59,667 views