Powered by micro-renewable energy: five energy harvesting chipsets that you need to know about

An IoT without batteries is the dream for making the concept viable for a world with a trillion nodes and a human population that will not be large enough to change all those batteries. The key to creating a sustainable IoT, and indeed a more sustainable world in general, is to harvest renewable energy to power smaller end devices so that batteries are no longer required in the design.

ipXchange has covered a few different energy harvesting solutions in the relatively short time we’ve been producing content, so here are five semiconductor manufacturers that are doing great work in the field, with chipsets that you can use in your next commercial project.

Atmosic

Atmosic has developed embedded solutions, such as the ATM3330e Bluetooth SoC, that are designed to work with the extremely low power consumption required by batteryless end products. The difference with Atmosic’s solution is that RF energy harvesting is built into the SoC, with a dedicated antenna serving as a collector for all the RF noise pollution that surrounds us in the modern world.

In stark contrast to micro-renewable power via ambient light energy, the dark is not an issue for RF energy harvesting, but the additional support for photovoltaic, thermal, motion, and other sources of micro-renewable energy makes Atmosic seem like the all-in-one solution. The addition of Bluetooth functionality and a 64-MHz Cortex-M33F MCU with DSP almost seems impossible to run without batteries, but Atmosic may have cracked it, and the ipXchange team saw a few different end products at Embedded World 2023, including medical devices, bicycle computers, and remote controls.

Though the power consumption is marginally higher than e-peas’ solution at 1.1 µA current draw in hibernate mode and 400 nA current draw with the SoC off (700 nA with harvesting enabled), Atmosic may be the Bluetooth SoC you need for a batteryless end product, so learn more on the dedicated board page and put it to the test by filling out a form.