[SCCC] More QRM!

Fri Mar 30 12:03:22 EST 2007

Anyone know what frequencies this will use? Hmmm......

Oh, yes, how does one become a "former physicist"? Forget everything?:-)

73 Art

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Death of the cell phone charger
A Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you all 
the battery juice you need directly from the air. Business 2.0 reports.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Melanie Haiken , Business 2.0 Magazine
March 30 2007: 7:08 AM EDT

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- How much money could you make from a 
technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, 
along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with 
it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major 
partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device 
powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast's platform uses nothing more 
complex than a radio--and is cheap enough for just about any company to 
incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a 
dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can 
be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves 
into DC electricity, recharging the device's battery at a distance of up 
to 3 feet.

Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your 
desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it 
get? "The sky's the limit," says John Shearer, Powercast's founder and 
CEO. He estimates shipping "many millions of units" by the end of 2008.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn't be done. 
"If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have 
said, 'Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?'" says Govi 
Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at 
Philips ( Charts). "But to see it work is just amazing. It could 
revolutionize what we know about power."

So impressed was Rao after witnessing Powercast's demo last summer that 
he walked away jotting down a list of the industries to which the 
technology could immediately be applied: lighting, peripherals, all 
kinds of handheld electronics. Philips partnered with Powercast last 
July, and their first joint product, a wirelessly powered LED light 
stick, will hit the market this year. Computer peripherals, such as a 
wireless keyboard and mouse, will follow in 2008.

Broadcasting power through the air isn't a new idea. Researchers have 
experimented with capturing the radiation in radio frequency at high 
power but had difficulty capturing it at consumer-friendly low power. 
"You'd have energy bouncing off the walls and arriving in a wide range 
of voltages," says Zoya Popovic, an electrical engineering professor at 
the University of Colorado who works on wireless electricity projects 
for the U.S. military.

That's where Shearer came in. A former physicist based in Pittsburgh, he 
and his team spent four years poring over wireless electricity research 
in a lab hidden behind his family's coffee house. He figured much of the 
energy bouncing off walls could be captured. All you had to do was build 
a receiver that could act like a radio tuned to many frequencies at once.

"I realized we wanted to grab that static and harness it," Shearer says. 
"It's all energy."

So the Powercast team set about creating and patenting that receiver. 
Its tiny but hyperefficient receiving circuits can adjust to variations 
in load and field strength while maintaining a constant DC voltage. 
Thanks to the fact that it transmits only safe low wattages, the 
Powercast system quickly won FCC approval--and $10 million from private 
investors.

Powercast says it has signed nondisclosure agreements to develop 
products with more than 100 companies, including major manufacturers of 
cell phones, MP3 players, automotive parts, temperature sensors, hearing 
aids, and medical implants.

The last of those alone could be a multibillion-dollar market: 
Pacemakers, defibrillators, and the like require surgery to replace dead 
batteries. But with a built-in Powercast receiver, those batteries could 
last a lifetime.

"Everyone's looking to cut that last cord," says Alex Slawsby, a 
consultant at Innosight who specializes in disruptive innovation. "Think 
of the billion cell phones sold last year. If you could get Powercast 
into a small percentage of the high-end models, those would be huge 
numbers."

Could Powercast's technology also work for larger devices? Perhaps, but 
not quite yet. Laptop computers, for example, use more than 10 times the 
wattage of Powercast transmissions.

But industry trends are on Shearer's side: Thanks to less energy-hungry 
LCD screens and processors, PC power consumption is slowly diminishing. 
Within five years, Shearer says, laptops will be down to single-digit 
wattage--making his revenue potential even more electrifying.

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