Zero-Power Communication - The next big thing

Zero-power communication has the opportunity to become the next game changer in internet of things (IoT) applications - called ZP-IoT.

Besides battery free sensors across industries, wearables for vital signs, such as heart rate via electrocardiogram, or smart home devices can be manufactured cost effectively in small form factors.

Batteries become obsolete. With zero maintenance energy storage solutions such as supercapacitors, the amount of charging cycles will increase to more than 100 times in comparison to lithium-ion batteries and make it a perfect solution to power ZP-IoT use cases. The capacitor gets charged from radio frequency energy harvesting modules to power up a microcontroller for a couple of seconds to handle a process cycle.

A process cycle for measuring and communicating follows four steps:

• power up the controller from deep sleep
• read sensor and validate data
• transmit sensor data
• power down and get in deep sleep

Microcontrollers like the ESP32 need about 30 microwatts in deep sleep until the ULP (ultra low power) coprocessor powers up the CPU and peripherals. In the process cycle the consumption increases up to 400 milliwatts without energy reducing strategies. Here's the challenge to find a feature/cost balance between cycle operations and storage size.

If I piqued your interest, dive a little bit deeper and visit the new whitepaper from OPPO - If you're interested in developing new products for ZP-IoT, feel free to get in touch with me.