A preferred partnership between NuCurrent and Infineon aims to achieve more use cases for near-field communication (NFC), with cellphones powering contactless, wireless smart locks, Tim Tumilty, executive VP of business development at NuCurrent, said.
This is the same technology at work when using a cellphone to open a hotel room door or Tap to Pay. The key difference: Infineon’s energy-harvesting actuator collects the phone’s energy to power the transaction—minimizing or even eliminating the need for batteries and the costs associated with those batteries, Tumilty said.
“One of the challenges of deploying smart locks is the batteries,” he said. “Home-lock manufacturers put 9-V battery terminals on the outside of the lock. If the battery goes dead, the homeowner has to find a 9-V battery. Many companies and industries—schools, hospitals and manufacturers—want to replace traditional keyed locks with smart locks. But batteries cost time and money to replace. Eliminating the dead battery problem is driving the demand.”
Infineon was looking for a wireless-charging expert to complement its single-chip technology on the system side, said Qi Zhu, Infineon’s director of marketing and business development.
“Infineon and NuCurrent are bringing together complementary capabilities that are paving the way for new solutions eliminating batteries in locks, sensors and other applications via contactless energy transfer,” Doris Keitel-Schultz, VP of contactless power and sensing at Infineon, said in a press release. “We are providing a reliable, low-maintenance and secure replacement for batteries that significantly reduces e-waste. Our energy-harvesting technology via a mobile phone NFC field enables the digitization of the passive world and connects [that world] to the mobile phone ecosystem.”The companies, which announced their partnership this year, expect to see the technology deployed to customers ahead of next year, with scaling afterward, Tumilty said.
“We’ve shipped evaluation kits to some customers,” he said. “The technology is ready to go for certain applications.”
The energy-harvesting technology comes from Infineon. NuCurrent is using its optimization tools and intellectual property around magnetics, circuit design and system integration to speed up the energy-harvesting process and to improve user experience, especially in highly metallic environments, such as locks, Tumilty said.
In the meantime, Infineon’s NFC tag-side controllers with integrated H-bridge and energy harvesting enable a way to develop more cost-effective, miniaturized actuation and sensing applications that operate in both passive and active mode, the companies said.
In the past, companies have used microcontrollers, but that required more components and was difficult to manage, Zhu said. “We’re the only company to provide single-chip solutions for this use case,” he added.
New potential use cases include locked cabinets to store power tools, locked storage units for delivered packages and drug delivery carts, Tumilty said. The application can also work with sensors and could eliminate batteries on the medical patches that some people wear.
Others include employee lockers, outdoor locks where frigid temperatures will damage batteries and medical wound care, Zhu said.
Zhu said he expected that new use cases would come from the traditional lock market finally making a switch to wireless locks. Meantime, Tumilty said the greatest interest is from lock manufacturers for both consumer and industrial applications whose users complain about dead batteries.
Remote access sites, such as cellphone towers and industrial maintenance areas, are another big potential market, Tumilty said: “Being able to manage locks and credentials for that industrial infrastructure through a cellphone is huge. Keys can get lost. Then you have to replace those remote locks. All of those kinds of costs can be eliminated.”
Improving sustainability by avoiding or limiting battery disposal is a factor for decision-makers at many companies, he said.
Improving response/unlocking time and user experience remain major hurdles.
The energy harvesting already takes less than a minute, Tumilty said. But most users are not patient enough to wait that long.
“Our goal is to at least double the performance time,” he added. “It takes three to five seconds to open a [standard] padlock. Reducing time is huge.”
Improving the antenna to harvest energy as fast as possible is important, Zhu said. Besides improving the antenna performance, optimizing the mechanical design to reduce the energy demand is also important for a better user experience.
“We also need to inform customers that this is a battery-free, green product, and they may need to wait a little longer,” Zhu said.
Another goal is to improve spatial freedom, enabling the technology to work with less precise placement of the cellphone, Tumilty said.
“We want to get the same experience as Tap to Pay,” he said. “That gives you more flexibility to the types of other products you can add.”
“NFC wireless energy harvesting and charging are game-changing technologies from various perspectives: product design, environmental sustainability and user experience,” NuCurrent CEO Jacob Babcock said in prepared remarks. “NFC is in billions of devices today, but the capabilities of energy harvesting are expanding such that it’ll deliver entirely new features to product developers.”
Source: EE Times
