Atmosic Technologies’ New Reference Designs Bring the Power of Photovoltaic-harvested Energy to IoT Manufacturers

The solar/light-powered remote control, keyboard and beacon/sensor reference designs are highly integrated to enable more compact and cost-efficient IoT product designs

Atmosic™ Technologies, an innovator of ultra-low power wireless for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced it has released its new ATM3 series of IoT reference designs, expressly developed to optimize power savings with photovoltaic energy harvesting to provide manufacturers with flexible, compact and cost-efficient design possibilities for Bluetooth connected devices. The reference designs integrate Atmosic’s award-winning M3 Bluetooth 5 system-on-chip (SoC) with energy harvesting technology.

Atmosic’s Lowest Power Radio and On-demand Wakeup technologies deliver up to ten times the power efficiency of competitive solutions. Atmosic has further enhanced power efficiency in the reference designs with integrated photovoltaic energy harvesting that significantly extends the battery life of IoT and consumer devices, enabling batteries to last the entire lifetime of the device to achieve “forever battery” life, or so they may operate without batteries, enabling “battery free” devices. Atmosic is providing photovoltaic energy harvesting designs for consumer applications as well as industrial designs.

The three reference designs – one for remote controls, another for keyboards and the third for beacons/sensors – are being released in Q2 of 2021, during which time Atmosic is offering demonstration units, evaluation kits and “how to” design collateral to qualified manufacturers. To get more information about the promoted designs and supporting information and tools, please contact info@atmosic.com.

“These reference designs will make it easy for IoT and consumer product designers and manufacturers to create remote controls, keyboards and beacons/sensors that have ‘forever battery’ life or are completely battery free, thanks to the power and design efficiencies from Atmosic’s lowest-power BLE and photovoltaic energy harvesting technology,” said Srinivas Pattamatta, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Atmosic. “These are yet another set of proof points that showcase how focusing on low power and energy harvesting in every aspect of design will dramatically reduce, and in many cases eliminate altogether, the IoT’s dependence on batteries.”

With Atmosic’s photovoltaic technology maximizing the solutions’ power-capture qualities, each of the reference designs only requires a very compact photovoltaic cell (the miniature equivalent of a solar panel) that fits compactly within the end-product design to capture ambient sunlight or indoor light, which is then stored to be used as needed. The designs offer a variety of energy storage options, with each having been developed with the goal of the end product requiring as little power as possible to operate, thus driving operational efficiencies in end use deployments.

The benefits of “forever battery” life are lower operational hassles and costs with the operator or end user rarely or never having to expend resources to replace batteries. In industrial implementations of beacons, for example, hundreds and even thousands of beacons may be deployed in a manufacturing plant, shopping center or entertainment venue so the costs of battery replacement can be expensive – taking into consideration both the cost of new batteries and labor – in addition to being time consuming. For personal applications such as remotes and keyboards, the reliable operation of the device is a huge benefit – the user does not have to bother with the inconvenience of replacing batteries. And the benefits extend beyond immediate user advantages to the more pressing environmental need to dramatically reduce battery dependence among the increasing number of deployed IoT devices worldwide.

Each of the new reference designs Atmosic is releasing this quarter offer a unique set of design features optimized for the product’s specific use case and design requirements. The ATM3 reference design series features Atmosic’s ultra-low power Atmosic BLE with a power management unit (PMU) integrated directly onto the BLE chip to achieve space and cost efficiencies. The intelligent PMU features direct connection to the photovoltaic (PV) cell to maximize harvesting efficiency, and delivers the energy required for the BLE operation in real-time while also storing excess energy not needed for immediate use.

Atmosic ATM3 Remote Control with Photovoltaic Harvesting

The ATM3 remote control reference design enables multi-year battery life (i.e. forever battery life) and also enables devices to be battery free depending the configuration. This can be done with a solar cell that is the size of two postage stamps – many times smaller than the competition.

The ATM3 remote control reference design provides three distinct storage configurations to provide for product design customization, including:

• Integrated standard coin cell battery with no supercapacitor
• Standard coin cell with supercapacitor
• Rechargeable coin cell with no supercapacitor.

Atmosic ATM3 Keyboard with Photovoltaic Harvesting

The ATM3 keyboard reference design offers the industry’s most efficient photovoltaic cell integration in a keyboard design. With Atmosic’s ultra-low power BLE and efficient energy harvesting, the PV cell is less than half the surface size of competitor designs, thus enabling manufacturers to create devices at a lower cost with greater design flexibility and an improved end-product design aesthetic. The M3’s best-in-class energy efficiency also enables smaller battery and energy storage options, resulting in additional design and cost efficiencies.

The ATM3 keyboard reference design supports flexible design configurations with two battery options and other energy storage configurations.

Atmosic ATM3 Beacon/Sensor with Photovoltaic Harvesting

Atmosic will disrupt the beacon/sensor market with its one-of-a-kind ATM3 beacon/sensor reference design featuring photovoltaic energy harvesting. The design is optimized for wireless performance and cost efficiency by integrating the photovoltaic cell, super capacitor and optional coin cell battery into the design, and the PMU on a single chip. Atmosic’s lowest-power BLE and efficient PV energy capture reduces the size of the photovoltaic cell that’s required to power the beacon, resulting in design and cost efficiencies. Due to the low power of Atmosic’s BLE solution, the solar cell needs to be only the size of the beacon – this enables sleek and compact designs for industrial applications, while devices are still able to achieve forever battery life.

The beacon/sensor design also features optional integration of a temperature/humidity sensor and accelerometer for sensing applications.

With its uniquely low-power BLE connectivity combined with energy harvesting, the ATM3 beacon/sensor design eliminates the need for costly battery replacement, which more than offsets the cost of the incremental features of this game-changing beacon design.

For more information on Atmosic’s Q2 reference design promotion and how to integrate Atmosic’s ultra-low power connectivity featuring energy harvesting into IoT product designs, contact info@atmosic.com.

About Atmosic Technologies

Atmosic™ Technologies is an innovative fabless semiconductor company, designing ultra-low power wireless and energy harvesting solutions to dramatically reduce and disrupt device dependency on batteries, aiming to deliver forever battery life and the battery free connected Internet of Things. The company’s products enable the IoT device ecosystem—designers and manufacturers, as well as end users and those responsible for deployments—to dramatically lower costs and efforts associated with maintaining the growing Internet of Things in Personal, Home, Auto, Healthcare, Industrial, Enterprise and Smart Cities segments. In addition to these tangible business advantages, Atmosic aims to reduce ecological impacts with its vision of dramatically reduced battery consumption in the Internet of Things.

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