Reducing energy consumption challenges and enabling wireless, battery-free applications at the edge of IoT networks
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With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of connected IoT devices, sensors, and actuators will continue to grow. At the edge of the IoT network, there are a large number of terminal nodes. Although these individual nodes may only require very low power and do not need to run continuously (start only when needed), the surge in the number of nodes will result in extremely high total power consumption. Therefore, the world faces the challenge of reducing energy consumption and needs to seek alternative energy sources to achieve new battery-free solutions to power these edge nodes and improve energy efficiency. At the same time, the market needs a series of wireless protocols to achieve wireless interconnection, so as to flexibly deploy, facilitate maintenance, and reduce costs.
ON Semiconductor, which is committed to promoting high-efficiency innovation, combines energy harvesting and low-power wireless interconnection technologies to provide a comprehensive range of ultra-low power wireless solutions, including innovative energy harvesting self-powered solutions, intelligent passive wireless sensors, and ultra-low power embedded hardware platforms that connect nodes to the cloud. These solutions address the energy and wiring harness challenges of IoT applications while reducing design and maintenance costs, and comply with the concept of sustainable development to make the world more environmentally friendly.
Energy harvesting technology refers to the process of recovering and converting unused energy such as thermoelectricity, vibration, motion, and solar energy into electrical energy to power applications instead of batteries. It will become increasingly important in the deployment of IoT. The key to achieving battery-free power supply through energy harvesting is low-power technology that supports ultra-low-power wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee, Sigfox, Mesh, Near Field Communication (NFC) and other standards. These protocols have their own advantages and meet different application requirements. Combining energy harvesting and low-power technology can save power, battery costs and replacement costs, and has environmental significance.
Bluetooth low energy has optimized energy efficiency and is easy to connect to smartphones. It is the preferred protocol for short-range communications in various smart devices such as wearables, medical devices, asset tracking, etc.
ON Semiconductor’s innovative Bluetooth low energy switch reference design is based on the industry’s lowest power Bluetooth 5 radio and combines it with ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s energy harvesting technology to capture the energy transmitted when the user presses the button, converting this kinetic energy into electromagnetic energy and ultimately into electrical energy, which is stored for use by the RSL10 SIP.
The RSL10 is a Bluetooth 5 certified radio system-on-chip (SoC) with a fully integrated antenna and all passive components. It leads the Embedded Microprocessor Test Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) ULPMark energy efficiency test, achieving a score of over 1,000 for the first time in the history of the test, and its system-in-package (SIP) module, the RSL10 SIP, simplifies system design and minimizes the bill of materials.
The energy harvesting scheme generates 300 μJ of energy per button press, which is enough to meet the extremely low power requirements of the RSL10 SIP: only 62.5 nW in deep sleep and as low as 7 mW in receive.
This Bluetooth low energy switch reference design operates entirely on harvested energy, enabling truly self-powered IoT applications and defining a new ultra-low power level for IoT, with example applications including wall and lighting controls, building automation, and asset tracking.
ON Semiconductor's Internet of Things Development Kit (IDK) was selected as the 2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year by IoT Evolution magazine and IoT Evolution World website, and was selected as the Rapid Prototyping Impact Award by ECN. It is a configurable, node-to-cloud rapid prototyping platform that covers all different types of capabilities, including ultra-low power connectivity, sensing, driving, power management, and even cloud-based management and analysis through embedded software and firmware to simplify and accelerate design.
B-IDK is a low-power rapid prototyping platform based on RSL10 Bluetooth 5 and combined with IDK capabilities. It provides the industry's lowest power consumption, ready-made sample code, supports AWS, Azure, Bluemix or customized cloud services for configurable cloud interconnection, and is easy to connect to other IDK daughter boards to expand sensing and control functions.
The energy harvesting Bluetooth low energy switch described above is compatible with both the IDK and the B-IDK.
Traditional Bluetooth interconnection enables point-to-point communication between two devices/nodes that are close to each other. Since the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) released Bluetooth Mesh, Bluetooth technology has begun to fully support Mesh networks, providing many-to-many device communication, supporting up to 32,000 network devices and mandatory network security, allowing device manufacturers to deploy large-scale, low-power Bluetooth Mesh networks to achieve long-distance interconnection for a wide range of applications such as smart homes, building automation and asset tracking.
ON Semiconductor has expanded the RSL10 family to support the Bluetooth Mesh standard, providing more features and the industry’s lowest power consumption, better enabling IoT edge node applications to benefit from the ubiquitous and easy-to-use Bluetooth low energy through the RSL10 USB adapter.
ZigBee is based on the IEEE802.15.4 standard, operates at a frequency of 2.4 GHz (a universal frequency worldwide), and supports short-range, low-power wireless communications. It has now developed into ZigBee 3.0, using the ZigBee ProR21 network, supporting reliable communications for the smallest, lowest-power devices, and also includes Green Power, which supports energy harvesting.
For example, ON Semiconductor's NCS36510 fully integrated, ultra-low power SoC RF transceiver has a receive power consumption of 6.7 mW and a transmit power consumption of 6.0 mW. It can operate on harvested energy and provides a wide input power supply voltage of 1.0 to 3.6 V. It integrates an ARM®Cortex®-M3 core and 640 kB flash memory, and uses AES256/128 and a true random number generator (TRNG) for security encryption. Typical applications include home and residential automation, building and industrial automation, and smart grids.
Sigfox is an ultra-narrowband technology that operates in a 200kHz bandwidth and uses unlicensed spectrum. It enables the simplest and lowest-cost interconnection and supports long-distance communications.
ON Semiconductor's Sigfox-certified solutions support all Sigfox regions (RCZ1-RCZ 4, RCZ7) around the world and comply with strict local RF regulations. For example, the system-level package solution AX-SIP-SFEU has an ultra-low power design with standby current, sleep current and deep sleep mode current of only 0.55 mA, 1.2 μA and 180 nA respectively. It integrates Sigfox radio, discrete RF matching, all required passive components and firmware in a single micro solution, providing ready-made Sigfox interconnection (uplink and downlink) for building and home automation as well as sensor and asset tracking. It has AT and application programming interface (API) versions, supports RCZ1 regional networks, and is CE-certified without the need for additional components and certifications.
Sub GHz supports long-distance, ultra-low power communications. ON Semiconductor's proprietary SubGHz RF products include independent RF cores, such as the narrowband version AX5043/AX5243, the broadband version AX5051/AX5031, and SoCs (combining an independent RF transceiver core with an MCU core) such as AX8052F1xx and AXM0F243, and are equipped with software development tools to support design.
Using these proprietary RF products can achieve the lowest power consumption solution suitable for the application. Since they do not follow standard network protocols, they save expensive certification fees and have no mandatory updates.
ON Semiconductor's Smart Passive Wireless Sensor (SPS) is a product that has repeatedly won innovation awards in the IoT field. It is based on the RFID standard protocol, so no cables are required; it collects energy from the received electromagnetic field signal, so no batteries are required. It can collect, measure and analyze various parameters such as temperature, humidity, distance, etc. at the edge of the network where it is difficult to wire or replace batteries. SPS breaks through traditional sensor technology and has significant advantages in designing low-power IoT platforms. It also overcomes the limitation of short communication distance in NFC technology. Other advantages of this solution include: ultra-thin and low expansion cost, thus solving the challenge of space constraints, and it is equipped with a development kit to become a complete one-stop solution, which can realize the rapid configuration and modification of multi-sensor IoT applications, with extremely high cost performance and accelerated design. SPS is suitable for various occasions that require data monitoring, especially applications such as predictive maintenance, factory automation and data centers.
The scale of IoT applications is constantly expanding, involving a large amount of energy consumption. Battery-powered devices also involve issues of battery life and maintenance. Energy harvesting technology is becoming increasingly important, and low-power wireless technology is the key to realizing its significance. The combination of these two technologies will help realize battery-free and maintenance-free wireless interconnection applications, in line with the world's high energy efficiency and environmental protection initiatives. With its leading and comprehensive ultra-low power wireless technology and rich technical application knowledge and experience, ON Semiconductor continues to develop a series of complete low-power wireless interconnection solutions to help realize battery-free/low-power wireless IoT applications at the edge of the IoT network, solve energy challenges, and reduce costs and speed up design.
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