Atmosic's team of wireless industry experts have previously pioneered CMOS RF design and successfully delivered billions of high-performance, connected devices. The company is now focused on bringing its vision of a battery-free connected devices to reality, and developing solutions to enable forever battery life to combat the tremendous effort, cost and ecological impact associated with battery maintenance for billions of connected devices.
“If you hate changing batteries, you’re going to like the technologies we’re developing to help eliminate that problem,” says John Hennessy, advisor to Atmosic and chairman of the Board of Alphabet. “Our vision is to extend and, in some cases, eliminate our reliance on batteries. To extend battery life of a device, the obvious choice is to lower its power consumption. Starting from a clean slate, the Atmosic team has rebuilt every circuit block of the radio to dramatically reduce its power consumption, while maintain full compliance to the Bluetooth 5 standard. Our team has also created system-level advancements to further extend battery life. Combining circuit-level and system-level innovations, we can reduce the power consumption to such a low level that energy harvesting is a genuinely viable power source, enabling low-duty cycle, low-power applications to have forever battery life or be battery free,” he adds.To radically reduce battery dependence for connected devices, Atmosic has perfected platforms with focus on three technologies: Lowest Power Radio, On-demand Wake-up, and Controlled Energy Harvesting. Atmosic took a wireless agnostic approach to determine the most power-efficient foundation for its first IoT connectivity solutions. With its first products, Atmosic is employing the Bluetooth 5 standards compliant platform to address challenges associated with installing and maintaining billions of connected devices, such as beacons, controllers, remotes, and asset and fitness trackers. Bluetooth 5 provides performance increases over legacy Bluetooth by four times the range (now comparable to Wi-Fi), double the speed, and eight times the bandwidth.
With its Lowest Power Radio and On-demand Wake-Up, Atmosic enables from 10 to 100 times lower power, reducing power utilization to such a low level that controlled energy harvesting is a viable power source for wireless connected devices. With the addition of Atmosic’s Controlled Energy Harvesting, the solution can deliver forever battery life or battery-free operation.
“By 2023, the installed base for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and NFC connected devices will be more than 35 billion worldwide, with a growing percentage targeting IoT applications. However, the time and money to maintain this magnitude of battery-dependent devices may well limit the potential of the connected IoT,” saysAndrew Zignani, senior research analyst of ABI Research. “Atmosic’s fresh approach to low power technologies and vision of a battery-free IoT may solve some of the key pain points of IoT.”“When Wi-Fi was in its infancy, we never envisioned it would become the pervasive communication that connects billions of individuals and devices,” adds David Su, CEO of Atmosic. “At Atmosic, we believe the battery-free Internet of Things offers similarly groundbreaking possibilities. Today’s M2 and M3 series launch marks a big step toward achieving forever battery life.”
The Atmosic M2 Series Bluetooth 5 SoC delivers 5 to 10 times lower power in active mode, and On-demand Wake-up reduces the power by 10 to 100 times. The Atmosic M3 Series Bluetooth 5 SoC has the additional feature of Controlled Energy Harvesting to provide forever battery life or eliminate the need for battery power. The M2 and M3 Series offer multiple application options for wearables, personal devices, remotes, and more. Packaging options for the M2 and M3 Series include flash and non-flash, 5x5 QFN, and 6x6 DRQFN packages. Both solutions are now available for sampling and will be in volume production in Q2 2019.
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