Silicon Labs Streamlines Energy Harvesting Product Development for Battery-Free IoT

Silicon Labs announced their new xG22E family of Wireless SoCs, Silicon Labs' first-ever family designed to operate within the ultra-low power envelope required for battery-free, energy harvesting applications. The new family consists of the BG22E, MG22E, and FG22E. As Silicon Labs' most energy-efficient SoCs to date, all three SoCs will enable IoT device makers to build high-performance, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), 802.15.4-based, or proprietary 2.4GHz wireless devices for battery-optimized and battery-free devices that can harvest energy from external sources in their environments like indoor or outdoor ambient light, ambient radio waves, and kinetic motion.

To help device manufacturers build a complete energy harvesting solution, Silicon Labs is also announcing their partnership with e-peas, a provider of industry-leading Power Managed Integrated Circuits (PMICs) designed for energy harvesting. Through this partnership, Silicon Labs and e-peas co-developed two energy harvesting shields for Silicon Labs' new, energy-optimized xG22E Explorer Kit. To better develop within the tight constraints that energy harvesting requires, the new xG22E Explorer Kit allows developers to customize the peripherals and debugging options that best match their application and get highly accurate measurements to better build their applications and devices with the energy harvesting shields. The energy harvesting shields are each tuned and optimized for different energy sources and energy storage technologies. They are custom-fit to slot onto the Explorer Kit. Notably, one of the shields uses e-peas' latest AEM13920 dual-harvester, which allows it to pull energy simultaneously from two distinct energy sources, like indoor or outdoor light, thermal gradients, and electromagnetic waves without sacrificing on energy conversion efficiency. The second co-developed shield is based on e-peas' AEM00300 shield, and is dedicated to harvesting power from random pulsed energy sources (more info).