Over the last 6-8 months, my teammates at WiPower have pointed to a drastic increase in my usage of a short yet profound word – “subtleties” – for good reason.

Technology development companies, such as WiPower and others in the wireless power space, spend a lot of brainpower and resources coming up with innovative technologies to enhance the way we live. In these years of development, novel electronic systems are created and patented. For most technology development companies, this is where the engineering slows and business development picks up – sell the underlying technology to companies that will productize it.

What can often occur with this business model is the “missed expectations” or “broken promises” phenomena – where the “subtleties” of taking a technology into a product stage are not as straight-forward as expected.

Take for example a small subset of the subtleties involved in creating wireless power products:
1. EM considerations: The electromagnetic fields emitted by a transmitter and coupled into a secondary coil are dependent on the environment that the product is in. For wireless power systems with flat coils, this involves inventing new types of materials with the right EM characteristics and very thin form factors, and creating processes to manufacture them.
2. Thermal management: Electronics dissipate heat. When integrated inside of a phone or other portable device, this heat must be well managed. However, most typical heat management techniques can no longer be used because they involve metal – something that interferes with wireless power signals.
3. Manufacturing: When moving from the prototypes displayed at CES to manufacturing 100,000 units cost-efficiently, the tuning of wireless power systems becomes quite difficult – the inherent variability in electronic components makes the tuning necessary for each unit different.

WiPower has had the good fortune to take its core technology and develop it into products for mass-production. Through this process, the team has been able to design a core wireless power technology that inherently solves the product issues many other wireless power technologies face. For me, this has resulted in a high level of confidence in our team’s ability to execute robust and cost-efficient wireless power systems for virtually any portable electronic device.

Thanks,
Ashish
(Product Development)