Wireless Power Requirements

A framework for matching wireless power requirements to

available technologies

Introduction
There is a lot of interest in wireless charging as the next “cutting the power
cord” revolution in consumer electronics. At Wi-Charge, we often get asked

●● What the capabilities of today’s wireless charging are, and

●● How to best match the application with the right charging technology.

This white paper aims to address these questions by presenting a framework

for matching requirements to technologies.

Why use wireless charging?

We see three reasons why people want to consider wireless charging:
Wireless
1. Keeping devices charged.
power keeps
devices Everyone has a phone and lots of people have “battery anxiety”. They worry
about their battery running out, where the nearest charger is, and so on. With
charged, wireless charging, there’s an opportunity to keep your devices charged without
eliminates having to actively manage the battery.

battery It’s like a water well. Many years ago, there were water wells and the family
had to manage the water supply in their home. They had to think about how
replacements much water they had. They had to go to the water well. Today, you just go to
and power the kitchen, you open the faucet and water’s there.
cables. It would be great if you didn’t have to think any more about battery charging
either, because it was just there.

2. Eliminating battery replacement.

You have battery-operated devices, and replacing batteries is both a pain

for consumers and sometimes limits the functionality of these devices. For
instance, smart door lock vendors might wish that their door lock could also
make a small video recording. Maybe there could be a three-second recording
uploaded to the cloud of anyone approaching the door. But the manufacturers
can’t do that because they are battery-limited. They could add all these
features that people really want though if the locks had endless power supply.

3. Eliminating power cables.

Prepared by Wi-Charge, Smart buildings are smart because they have all these sensors, but the
August 2018
sensors require power. With many sensors, there’s complexity involved with

A framework for wireless power requirements 1

 Wireless Power Requirements

many wires and a large installation cost. But if there was wireless power, you
wouldn’t need to spend all that money.

Wireless power means different things to different

people
Wireless power means different things to different people. For some people,
it’s as simple as charging a toothbrush without a wire. For others, it’s charging
a phone. For others, it’s “I want to charge a Tesla electric vehicle.”

There is also divergence in how people want to charge. For example, do we

charge it on a pad, do we charge it in a room, do we charge it from space? We
want to start making some sense of all the wireless charging options. And to
do that, we’ve created a framework to help explain the wireless charging world.

The key By the way, when we say, ‘wireless charging’ and ‘wireless power’, we use
these terms interchangeably. We prefer the term ‘wireless power’ when talking
performance about technology and will use ‘wireless charging’ more when we speak about
parameters applications and user experience. But essentially, they’re the same.
for wireless
The two key parameters in wireless power
charging are
Power and The two key parameters for wireless power are power and distance. These are
not just technical parameters, but they determine much of the application and
Distance. the user experience later on.

Let’s start with power. Power is not just some number expressed in watts.
Power determines what devices or what kind of application you can support.
Since some people are not familiar with watts and don’t know how to map

There are
four power
brackets:
peripherals,
smart home,
smartphones
and notebook.

A framework for wireless power requirements 2

 Wireless Power Requirements

devices to watts, the below diagram provide some scale that basically places
representative device categories into their appropriate power bracket.

We don’t have anything with very high power represented in the diagram. No
electric vehicles. No atomic submarines, or anything like that. Everything listed
in the diagram is a small electronic device.

Notice that we have a lot of discrepancy between devices in terms of their

power consumption even within these small device categories. For example,
a laptop computer will take about 1000 x more power than a wireless mouse.
So, in terms of wireless power, those two devices will demand vastly different
approaches. In any case, power represents the types of devices that can be
supported.

‘Smart home’ refers to smart devices that do fancy things and which will be
connected to the cloud. Peripherals include keyboards, mice, remote controls,
etc., as well as all the not-so-smart devices that don’t do that much. They just
perform one function, and don’t do a lot of number crunching.

Now let’s add distance.

There are
four distance
brackets: pad,
desk, room
and outdoors.

Distance determines the charging user experience. The use case. If the
distance of the supported distance is very short, we’ll be talking about charging
on a pad. The user would need to place the device on a pad. As we move
further out to longer distances, we’ll be able to create a desktop environment.
Next is the ability to charge devices anywhere in the room. Finally, if we have
even greater distance, we’ll be able to entertain some outdoor applications.

A framework for wireless power requirements 3

 Wireless Power Requirements

The key takeaway is that power and distance largely determine the application
and the user experience. That’s why those are the two most important
parameters.

Two use cases

0.5 Watt
Now, let’s look at two representative examples of devices and how we place
is needed them on this power/distance map. Probably the most obvious example for
to keep wireless charging would be a phone. That’s absolutely the killer app for
wireless power. So, if we’re taking the representative phone, in our case it will
an iPhone be an iPhone X.
battery from
To charge it, you need some power levels that start charging. You can argue
draining. whether it’s half a watt or a watt (that would be the absolute minimum to get
any kind of battery charging) all the way up to 10 watts for fast charging. For
our purposes, reasonable paces or reasonable speeds of charging are when
you are delivering at least two or three watts as a minimum. We would like
to see that the device charges wherever we put it. So, we will be looking at
a distance of several meters from a transmitter that is placed in a single spot
to support a kind of background charging without requiring the phone to be
anywhere specific.

Let’s see how it looks on the power/distance map.

It would be fair to place a fairly wide silo around the phone where we see that
it requires anywhere in the range between one watt and all the way up to 10
watts. In terms of user experience, we would very much appreciate a phone
that charges anywhere in the room. That would be very, very useful. But as we
know, we also have the charging pad use cases. They will be less useful. The

A framework for wireless power requirements 4

 Wireless Power Requirements

reason we’re showing the silo a little bit washed out on the edges is because
the usefulness of a charging pad is lower than the usefulness of a phone
charging anywhere.

The second example we’ll analyze will be a smart door lock. Relative to a
smart phone, its typical power requirements will be lower. One-tenth of a watt
(0.1 watts) will typically be enough to keep a smart door lock doing what it’s
meant to do. In terms of the distance that we need to support, that will be
determined by where the nearest wall outlet is, because that’s where we’ll plug
the energy transmitter. It could be two meters. In some cases, it could less,
on others it could be more, but that’s the representative distance we use. If
we see it on the map, it occupies a smaller silo. It’s meaningless to charge
something like a smart door lock on a pad. It’s not very meaningful to charge it
outdoors, either. It’s more confined to a room environment, as it should be.

Candidates
for wireless
power are Applicable technologies
magnetic
We can now use the smart phone and the smart door lock examples to
induction, discuss technologies and their ability to perform various charging functions
and support the various applications.
radio
frequency We start with what’s available on the market. Magnetic induction has been
around for quite a while. We know that it supports many types of devices.
and infrared Inductive charging spans the entire scope of small electronic devices all the
light. way to notebooks, and probably even beyond that.

The limitation of magnetic induction is the very, very short distance that it
supports. For that reason, they’re currently confined to the pad’s use case and
the only applications that we are aware of are inductive charging that supports

A framework for wireless power requirements 5

 Wireless Power Requirements

Magnetic
induction can
deliver a lot
of energy,
but is limited
to very short
distance.

personal mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and sometimes smart

watches, but that’s about it. We have not seen a serious attempt to power any
smart home device (like a smart camera, a smart speaker or a smart door
lock) using inductive charging, simply because those applications typically
need significant distance in order to be meaningful. No person will periodically
drag these devices to the charging pad.

That’s what we have today on the market. This marginal support of personal
mobile devices and total lack of support of smart devices of any other kind
has created a void. Quite a few companies have attempted to enter and deliver
a technology that will allow significantly longer charging distance in order to
occupy (or at least entertain) those silos where you can charge either smart
home devices or personal mobile devices anywhere in the room.

The natural first stop for any company that tried to do long distance wireless
power was of course RF.

RF is a natural choice because it has served the communication space so

well. There are many commoditized components available for RF. There
is also a lot of engineering talent available for it. It just seems to be a very
logical conclusion that if RF does so well in communications, it must also do
very well with wireless power. Unfortunately, as some people discovered very
quickly, it turns out that the very properties that made RF so well-adapted to
communication actually crippled it in terms of wireless power delivery.

When you try to pack RF into a tight beam and send it over to some distant
point, it tends to disintegrate very quickly. In fact, it turns out that delivering RF
beams over distances beyond one meter is almost impossible. Keep in mind
that we are talking here about practical in-home implementations for electronic
devices, not huge antennae and dishes.

A framework for wireless power requirements 6

 Wireless Power Requirements

Similarly, when you try to crank up the power level, you basically discover
that going beyond 0.1 watt (or something in this range) makes you violate
the applicable safety standards for radio, which is also quite unfortunate.
Eventually, you end up with a humble envelope of potential performance.

In ideal
"best case"
scenarios,
RF is limited
RF certainly has much longer reach than magnetic induction, but the reach
to about 0.1 is limited and the power level that you can support is really small. We think it
can probably very marginally support some smart home applications. It can
Watt at about support peripherals like wireless mice or keyboards in a desktop environment,
1 meter. or applications that don’t require anything beyond a meter. But to really provide
meaningful support for the vast majority of smart home applications and
personal mobile devices is completely outside the realm of RF technology.

Fortunately for Wi-Charge, we understood this limitation early on, and we

looked for a technology that would power both mobile devices and smart
devices from anywhere in the room. We wanted a technology that could cover
distances of at least 10 meters and potentially power to 10 watts and beyond.
We discovered a very nice thing: infrared. At first, it seemed an unlikely choice
because it’s not very highly regarded in the communications space. However,
it turns out that infrared has two magnificent properties that make it very well
suited for wireless power.

First, you can pack a very tight beam of infrared power and carry it for fairly
long distances. To get a sense of what infrared can do, think of a laser
pointer. It’s a device that can carry a small beam over long distances without
disintegrating. You cannot do anything like what a laser pointer does with RF
technology. RF beams expand and fill the entire space very quickly. But with
infrared, we basically have the capability of covering long distances without
losing shape or disintegrating, to deliver all the power to a device.

A framework for wireless power requirements 7

 Wireless Power Requirements

The second infrared property is even more attractive. RF is a man-made

radiation that was invented about 150 years ago. Before then, there was
practically no RF in the universe. It turns out that RF is quite harmful to all
forms of life and that’s why its safety limits kick in at such an early point.
Infrared, on the other hand, has been with us all along. About half of the solar
energy heating the Earth is infrared. When forms of life on Earth developed,
they were bathing in infrared, so we’re very much biologically adapted to it.
That’s why infrared exhibits roughly 100 times more relaxed safety limits than
RF.

Power and
distance
performance
for IR is much
higher than
RF.
We found that infrared is not only the most suitable technology, but
fundamentally the only one that can provide a power-charging solution to
cover ranges of 10 meters and even beyond.

A framework for wireless power requirements 8

 Wireless Power Requirements

Key points

With infrared, you can deliver a focused, narrow beam of light directly from the
power transmitter to a very small receiver.
Natural
Infrared is natural light. Because the beam is so small and focused, 100% of
light, such it reaches the receiver. If 100% of the beam reaches the receiver that means
as IR, has that 0% of the beam reaches other objects, people, animals or pets in the
space.
better safety
In contrast, when you you look at other technologies, they’re usually man-
limits than made radiation and the beam diverges quite significantly. That means that if
man-made you have a small receiver (such as the one you’d like to embed in a phone), the
receiver can capture only a very tiny fraction of the energy. It’s very inefficient.
radiation such If you try to offset that by cranking up the energy on the transmitter’s side, you
as RF. very quickly run into safety limits. Only a tiny portion of the energy reaches the
receiver (such as the phone), and all the remaining energy is wasted or worse:
it hits people, objects, pets or other things that you didn’t intend to bathe in
radio frequency radiation.

A framework for wireless power requirements 9

 Wireless Power Requirements

Summary

We introduced a framework to understand the needs of wireless power

devices and discussed how existing technologies can address their charging
needs.

To learn more about Wi-Charge, visit www.wi-charge.com.

For one-minute demos of the Wi-Charge technology,

please visit www.will-it-charge.com.

©2018 Wi-Charge Ltd.

A framework for wireless power requirements 10