Energous Granted FCC Approval for Unlimited Distance Over-the-Air Wireless Charging

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

October 19, 2021

News

Energous Granted FCC Approval for Unlimited Distance Over-the-Air Wireless Charging

Energous Corporation announced that its 900MHz 1W Active Energy Harvesting transmitter technology has received U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Part 15 grant of equipment authorization for wireless power transfer at any distance.

This approval complements a similar unlimited distance wireless charging approval in Europe, announced in May, 2021, expanding the ecosystem reach for WattUp charging. 

“Our WattUp active energy harvesting solution provides U.S and European developers an approved wireless charging option when designing the power networks needed to cost effectively and efficiently deploy IoT sensors, low-power CPUs and other devices,” said Cesar Johnston, acting CEO at Energous.

The 1W Active Energy Harvesting transmitter can charge multiple devices at once, enabling at-any-distance over-the-air charging for IoT devices such as retail sensors, electronic shelf labels, industrial devices and more.

The Energous Active Energy Harvesting technology can be deployed as a mesh network to support seamless power transfer for IoT devices over any distances.

Specifically, the solution includes:

  • Energous DA4100 Wireless power transmitter SoC
  • Energous DA3210 power amplifier
  • DA14682 SmartBond™ Bluetooth System on Chip (SoC)
  • Single feed antenna design

"Energous’ Active Energy Harvesting transmitting technology is going to significantly increase their range enabling these energy harvesting beacons to work with typical Wi-Fi / BLE deployments in enterprises and open the door to a whole new range of IoT use cases,” said Bob Friday, Bob Friday, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Network's AI-Driven Enterprise Business. “We are excited at the insight that this will bring to our customers when fused together with the patented Juniper Mist vBLE technology that is integrated in our Access Points.”

“As IoT devices continue to become more widespread, especially in the retail setting where the electronic shelf label market is projected to expand over 21% annually to eclipse $2.5B by 2028, demand for new wireless charging options to reduce burdens associated with wired charging is growing,” said Johnson Lee, CEO of E Ink. “Energous’ FCC approval will help the industry bring strong user experiences to customers and we’re excited for this milestone from one of our key partners.”

Dinesh Kithany, chief analyst at Wired and Wireless Technologies (WAWT), states, “This is another important milestone achieved by Energous, and is positive news for the wider distance wireless charging technology sector as well as for device makers in the growing IoT market. FCC approval backed by the company’s earlier European approval will open new opportunities for at-a-distance charging for billions of IoT devices across industrial, retail, healthcare, and smart home applications. As predicted by WAWT’s research, 2021 will be a breakthrough year for ‘distance’ wireless charging market and Energous’ 1W Part 15 FCC certification for power any distance indicates our predictions were accurate.”

"AirFuel Alliance and Energous are championing the standardization of RF charging while paving the way for product interoperability and infrastructure development,” said Sanjay Gupta, President of AirFuel Alliance. “Just as Wi-Fi is the data backbone for interconnected devices and sensors, we believe that RF-based wireless charging will be the power backbone of the multi-billion-dollar IoT ecosystem."

 

For more information, visit Energous.com.

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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