This week we have seen Apple’s version of the IoT, a system for control through WiFi. Things like being green, or power management are someone else’s problem, but if everyone acted like that, there would be no IoT.
Someone has to build the ultra-low power chips, sensors and actuators that allow Things on the internet to make changes to their surroundings. These fall into three categories, those that you can plug in, those which can run on a battery, and those which harvest energy from sources around them.
As we attach more and more things to the internet the energy harvesting category becomes the ‘bleeding edge’ of IoT. Without it you will have 100 devices in your home that need batteries and while Zigbee, Z-Wave and Bluetooth Smart all mean that battery life is measured in multiple years, if we can allow energy to be harvested in real time, that could extend to ‘forever,’ which in turn could mean that many more devices, into the 1,000s per home, might one day have internet connections.
This week Spansion, the AMD owned flash memory company has come out with a series of chips designed to be part of the emerging ecosystem for energy harvesting, targeting power management, and connecting to ambient sources of power including light, vibration and temperature changes.
They are aimed at two segments; entirely power free devices, and those which can extend the life of batteries, but refilling them in situ. As such the chips come with a set of design tools including a simulator that helps with energy budget calculations when devices are in their design phase.
Spansion already claims to have a broad ecosystem of partners in energy harvesting which can upgrade to these chips. One of the key areas it is targeting is battery maintenance, extending applications which would not quite be practical with a replaceable battery, by building in cheap replenishment, so that the battery depletes over a much longer lifetime.
This is perfect to target at widespread industrial applications, for instance devices working on distributed power management. If you have 50 million devices out there looking after power at multiple points in a power supplier’s network, the maintenance process would be horrendous just to replace batteries. This type of application can extend or prevent this being required.
Tom Sparkman, senior vice president of Spansion’s Analog Business Unit, said ‘our customers can say goodbye to battery usage in their next-generation electronics. Coupled with our low-power MCUs and the energy-budget calculator in the Spansion Easy DesignSim support tool, the Spansion Energy Harvesting PMICs offer a differentiated solution that can help our customers offer more eco-friendly devices across a broad spectrum of applications.’
The Spansion Energy Harvesting family includes the MB39C811, a power management chip for harvesting both solar and vibration and the MB39C831, for solar or thermal energy. These all work with ultra-low-power Arm-based microcontrollers.
The Spansion Easy DesignSim, is a comprehensive online design support tool an energy-budget calculator, which calculates energy-budget balance and provides a recommended bill of materials.