The first smartphones with integrated wireless power were released in 2011; since then, the Wireless Power Consortium has certified over 800 different products. Most of these products are smartphone or transmitter related.
Wireless Power offers significant benefits beyond the improved convenience offered in smart phone space – for example, the opportunity to remove connectors, making products waterproof, easier to clean and more robust. Plus the ability to send power and improve safety in harsh environments also offers its own set of benefits. As a result it is expected that the technology is to become more pervasive in many applications beyond smartphones.
It is interesting how frequently engineers have technical challenges when implementing wireless power designs, especially the first time they develop one. Important system needs such as power dissipation and foreign object detection (FOD) can create design challenges. The ability to achieve WPC compliance or to simply ensure a good user experience is determined greatly by the components used, the coil type and the board layout.
Figure 1: The 500511 wireless power transmitter controller and the bq50002 analog front end.
New advancements in wireless charging technology make it easier for designers by offering higher integration, increasing efficiency by up to 5% and reducing standby power to just 25mW even during Ping. A new two-chip solution from Texas Instruments comprises the bq500511, wireless power transmitter controller and the bq50002, analog front end. The bq50002 integrates all the analog functions in the system including FETs, drivers, current sense, regulators and the demodulation filter. The bq500511 handles the communication and WPC protocol. The advantage of using two ICs is that it ensures that the digital components are in a digital process and the analog components are in an analog process – which in turn creates a very cost-effective solution that can be used for WPC based or proprietary transmitters up to 5W.
In order to make it easier for engineers to use these products and more quickly get into production TI has provided extra development tools. These include a TI Design reference design, TIDA-00623, for designing a small 5W wireless power transmitter, and a design tool, bqStudio which enables engineers to more easily tune and optimize the FOD of their system.
As wireless power technology becomes more popular and new features and power levels are enabled, it will be critical for companies to provide development tools like these to make it easy to integrate wireless power technology into different applications.
Additional resources
- Check out the new two-chip wireless charging solution:
- Learn more about TI’s wireless-charging portfolio.
- Get started today with the Small 5W Wireless Power Transmitter Reference Design
- Tune and optimize the FOD of your system with the bqStudio design tool.
