Huawei Has Joined it’s NB-IoT Device Together with NOWI’s Energy Harvesting PMIC Allowing IOT Applications Autonomous Operation
Huawei is featuring an NB-IoT solution whereby energy harvesting is utilized for powering the NB-IoT SoC indefinitely via a recent PMIC and a jointed solar panel. This takes out the need for manual solutions (changing batteries) or cabling, to provide power for applications with zero power supply and zero maintenance.
The solution makes use of a Huawei Boudica V150 development board that allows for plug and play of several peripherals and sensors and along with the highly integrated V150 NB-IoT SoC and battery charging circuitry on the basis of NOWI’s ultra-high efficiency NW-A2.3 PMIC Energy Harvesting device.
Battery life in several use-cases is shorter than the application life, thereby needing maintenance in the course of system usage and thereby massively heightening total cost of ownership of IoT.
IoT nodes are known for being distributed in “difficult to access” or remote areas, allowing cables to be impossible and making the changing of batteries more expensive.
NOWI, a semiconductor company based in the Netherlands, which was established recently, has started up novel energy harvesting technology which allows for capturing of ambient energy sources including temperature, light, gradients or radio frequency, which have the highest efficiency.
It has reached this feat while also reducing the PCB assembly footprint up to 30 times and taking away the need for several external components including inductors.
Owing to this, NOWI’s energy harvesting technology can both fit and power into virtually any small IoT device, or directly in RF modems, and thereby allows for these devices to end up being ‘Plug & Forget’.
Applications
The combination of high performance energy harvesting and low-power connectivity enables devices to become ‘Plug & Forget’. This possesses the advantage of taking out the need for node maintenance and thus greatly decreasing the entire cost of ownership of an IoT system.
In the examples below, this is supposed to have a great impact:
Smart Industry: IoT nodes will be utilized for the tracking and monitoring in several industrial applications. The devices are usually placed in difficult and dangerous to get to places, allowing any form of maintenance to become problematic.
Smart Cities: Devices will be made spread over large areas, allowing maintenance to become costly if not impossible. The major part of Smart City business cases need energy harvesting to become viable.
Smart Wearables: Utilization of Wearable devices for health-related purposes require the devices to be at a high degree of autonomy. Energy Harvesting and NB-IoT allow it to be possible for the user to have connectivity without a smartphone in close proximity as well as without having to recollect the need to charge the device regularly.
