Accelerate Development of Your Qi® Wireless Power Solution

What Is Wireless Charging?

Wireless charging or wireless power transfer refers to the process of transferring electrical power to portable, battery-powered devices without the use of wires. Wireless charging methods are a convenient, safe and durable way to charge wearables (like smart watches, heart rate monitors or hearing aids), phones, tablets, toys, laptops, power tools, robots and medical devices. The most common and most popular devices to use wireless charging are smartphones and most new phones can be charged wirelessly. Wireless charging is now widely used across multiple industries including consumer, automotive and health care.

Wireless Power Offerings

We offer solutions for all power ranges covering from less than 1 Watt (W) to 300W. Our wireless power solutions can be categorized by the power delivered by the system.

• Less than 1W for applications like hearing aids

• 1W to 5W for applications such as joystick controllers, medical devices and LED lanterns.

• 5W to 15W for charging smartphones and tablets (for example, Qi^® wireless power solutions)

• Medium power typically ranges from 45W to 300W for products such as laptops, power tools, pool lighting, drones, lawn mowers and mobile industrial robots

Our reference designs provide transmitter and receiver system solutions for reliable power transfer with high efficiency and effective Foreign Object Detection (FOD). Utilizing our reference designs, customers can speed up time to market and customize the hardware to meet specific customer requirements. We also offer highly flexible software to support varying customer requirements and to comply with ever-evolving standards. We have a worldwide Field Application Engineer (FAE) team with expertise in Qi v1.3 and authentication to help you with your design-in efforts.

Figure 1: Wireless Power Solutions

dsPIC^® Digital Signal Controller (DSC)-Based Qi Solution

Our Qi 15W dsPIC^® DSC-based multi-coil wireless power transmitter solution is Qi v1.3 certified, which gives you the confidence that your products will be more easily certified as well. This automotive-grade reference design includes the dsPIC33 DSC, the ECC608 TrustFLEX WPC or Trust Anchor TA100 secure storage subsystem that we provision as a licensed Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) Manufacturer Certificate Authority (CA) and other components. The software architecture is flexible and enables implementation of exceptionally reliable FOD and proprietary fast-charging schemes for product differentiation. This transmitter reference solution supports CAN FD hardware and software for easy integration into an automotive system and includes space optimized front-end buck-boost control managed by a microcontroller (MCU) that manages wireless power.

One of the most significant challenges when adopting wireless power systems is in the critical stage of embedding the system into the product design. The dsPIC DSC-based solution offers a full package of resources which translates into an efficient turnkey Qi wireless charging platform. Included with the solution are the following:

• Software

• Design files

• Technical documentation

• Certifications

• Microchip design expertise

Customers benefit from:

• Differentiation of their design

• Reduced component count and costs

• Reduced R&D costs

• Ability to get to market faster

Functional Safety and Automotive Ecosystem

If you are looking for automotive AEC-Q100-qualified devices with functional safety support, our dsPIC33C DSC family offers a wide range of devices to choose from with safety-specific hardware features to suit your application. To meet functional safety and security requirements, we offer functional safety packages comprising of safety manuals, FMEDA reports and diagnostic libraries. We also offer a complete ecosystem including AUTomotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) basic software, AUTOSAR operating system, Microcontroller Abstraction Layer configurator and drivers along with our partners for select devices.

Figure 2: Functional Safety

Figure 3: Automotive Ecosystem

Wireless Power Market

The demand for wireless charging is growing mostly due to increasing consumer awareness as more mobile devices are being launched with embedded wireless charging technology. In addition, the growth can also be attributed to insufficient availability of electric sockets in public places and malfunctioning ports due to high usage. We find that the 15W Qi-based applications are prevalent in automotive applications for which we provide a complete ecosystem including functional safety and security solutions. Additionally, we also support consumer applications for wireless charging.

Overall, wireless charging is a reliable and convenient technology for powering and charging electronic devices. In addition, it is now more efficient, cost effective and safer than traditional charging systems due to the elimination of physical connectors and cables. In addition, it maintains continuous power transmission to ensure that equipment is always available. dsPIC DSC reference design is a convenient and ideal way for Microchip developers to get their Qi certified solutions to market faster.

The article and images are from Microchip-Swati Joshi & Pramit Nandy