Rethinking IoT power

Modern urban spaces include innovative technologies that will make our lives more flexible and healthy while ensuring safety, comfort, accessibility, and circularity. These technologies create a need to measure the data continuously from a tremendous number of sensors of hundreds of types scattered throughout the urban space. Then the data is analyzed by cutting-edge technologies (such as A.I.) to produce automatic adjustments or alerts. Examples: streetlight systems could be strengthened when people walk around at night; noise cancellation technologies may be applied automatically in noisy places; alerts may be sent automatically to people when temperature or pollution levels reach a critical level, etc.

The commonality of these scenarios and thousands more is the need to use sensors. Future cities will utilize millions of sensors everywhere, measuring noise, radiation, and more. These sensors require electrical power and maintenance. These two elements are the weakest in the application of sensors and create a massive challenge for their successful implementation over time.

Ideally, we'd prefer having sensors that need no power and no maintenance. Today, this is impossible. When we multiply the energy consumption of each sensor by the incredible number of billions of sensors (by 2025, it is expected to be over 1 billion sensors only in one application in streetlight), the problem becomes severe. Operating such immense IoT systems in a city might require the electrical power produced by an entire power station. Plus, it would require large budgets of millions to support maintenance (e.g., technician workforce, replacement of aging sensing devices).

Eta-Bar's team noticed this growing problem (that seems to be overlooked) and realized it is essential to rethink how sensors are powered and installed. The team set to develop a solution that saves a significant quantity of energy, and increases the reliability of the sensing devices, so their life could be significantly prolonged and hardly ever need maintenance.

Eta-Bar will significantly reduce the cumulative energy consumed by sensing devices by solving this huge problem. It will save on the construction of complete power plants, directly contribute to less pollution, and thus affect the climate problem.

The technology we have developed focuses on the powering units of low-power IoT devices. The technology is named CCPS (Cool Capacitive Power Supply). The CCPS replaces existing power supplies that are oversized, resulting in low energy efficiency and low reliability. Integrating the CCPS technology in IoT devices makes them sustainable devices which are highly energy-efficient, nearly maintenance-free (due to inherent high reliability), and safe (can not self-ignite).

The increased reliability translates to a longer lifespan of the devices that utilize our technology, up to several decades. This advantage allows sensors to be embedded like electrical cables within the infrastructure of old and new buildings, in places where maintenance may be hard and expensive, without compromising design and aesthetics.

The CCPS will enable more sensors to make the environment more accessible to the entire public.

In addition, the high reliability significantly reduces the waste to the environment, mainly of plastic parts, batteries, and waste electrical and electronic components.

The CCPS technology is a proven technology, and it is already implemented in street lighting controllers in smart-city applications in tens of thousands of devices.