The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an integral part of our daily life today. Electronic appliances, connected security systems, cars, and speaker systems are some of the daily-life examples where we are using IoT on a regular basis. However, Wi-Fi transceivers need hundreds of milliwatts energy for maintaining the connection between commercial Wi-Fi radios and IoT devices. This enforces Wi-Fi compatible devices to either have huge batteries, do regular recharging, or to depend on other exterior power sources to keep working. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have come up with a unique solution to deal with this issue.
Ultra-Low Power Wi-Fi radio To Work in Less Energy
The research team announced the development of new ultra-low power and tiny Wi-Fi radio. These radios allow IoT devices to communicate with Wi-Fi networks in extremely low power than that of present Wi-Fi radios. Moreover, researchers stated that the new radios work on just 28 microwatts power. This power requirement is about 5000 less than the current Wi-Fi radios’ energy requirement.
Dinesh Bharadia is the lead scientist of this research. He stated, “You can connect smart devices, phone, various sensors, or small cameras to this chip. It allows you to send data directly from these devices to a Wi-Fi access point nearby your location. There is no need to purchase anything else to complete this task. And this chip could last for years on only one coin cell battery.” The research is slated to be presented this week at the ISSCC 2020 conference in San Francisco.
Patrick Mercier, co-leader of this research, stated, “This Wi-Fi radio is low-power. The technology allows us to start thinking about the newest application spaces where there will be no need to plug IoT devices into the walls. This could allow for the future with fully wireless, smaller IoT setups.”
