Frankly, after all of ipXchange’s PCIM, GaN, and SiC coverage over the course of 2023, it’s quite hilarious that the winner of our ‘Power’ category has no association with any of these supposed cornerstones of power innovation. You engineers voted with your projects, so this one was easy.
ipXchange’s winner of best power discovery in 2023 is a collaboration between energy-harvesting masters e-peas and battery legends NGK, who came together with a reference design, the EP2016, that combines NGK’s rechargeable EnerCera Li-ion coin batteries with e-peas’ AEM10300 adaptive buck-boost ambient energy manager battery charger IC to create a solar-powered alternative to the traditional CR2016 coin cell found in wearables, PC peripherals, remote controls, asset tracking devices, and other compact end products.
This reference design can be used as a plug-and-play replacement of a primary (non-rechargeable) CR2016 battery during evaluation should you wish to add a micro-renewable-energy spin (with cold-start from 3 μW input power) to an existing or new product. Pretty neat, right?
e-peas showed off some other very cool implementations of their energy harvesting technology at Embedded World 2023, enabling products like remote controls, Bluetooth keyboards, and IoT devices to operate solely on harvested ambient energy. A key point for many of their devices is ease of integration; the AEM10300 at the heart of the EP2016 reference design only requires three external passives for design in, despite being able to manage energy harvesting from an up-to-7-cell PV source and deliver this to a storage element, with all the protections you’d come to expect from a typical battery-charging circuit. And with capabilities like these, it was no wonder why ipXchange had several keen engineers wanting to test this innovative power solution for their compact builds.
Study the technical specifications by following the link to the board page, and join the crowd by filling out a form if you’d like to put this or any other e-peas device to the test for your next micro-renewable-powered design.
Keep designing!
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