PowerSource

Ten companies, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, Texas Instruments, RIM, and Samsung, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the European Commission in Brussels to develop and standardize on a universal charger based on the micro-USB connection. These chargers will work with data-enabled mobile phones that support USB data exchange.

According to this article in the BBC, “Currently there are more than 30 different types of chargers for handsets throughout Europe. EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen says he also wants to see the common charger expand in the years ahead ...Read More

No big plans for the weekend? How about some DIY solar energy project plans? BuildItSolar has a plethora of plans. Some that look especially good:

-Solar-charged EV scooter (“Don rides the scooter 5 miles to work each day, and can fold the panels out for charging the battery while parked at work.”)

--Solar pool and hot tub heating

-I especially liked the section on water efficiency, including rainwater harvesting and graywater use. (Its only ...Read More

Last month, researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland announced their efforts to develop a rechargeable lithium-air battery that could deliver a 10x increase in energy capacity compared to that of currently available lithium-ion cells. Research has included investigating the materials issues associated with a non-aqueous O2 electrode. (Keeping the water out while letting in oxygen from the air is tricky but necessary because of lithium's violent reaction with water.)

"The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery. says Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at t...Read More

Big news on the PMBus front: TI has announced that they’ve signed a license agreement for Power-One’s digital power technology patents. Note that TI is licensing the patents on digital power control technology including the configuring, control and monitoring of power systems – TI is not licensing Power-One’s control bus itself. Also, the license will extend only to OEMs using TI power control chips as point-of-load controllers; It will not extend to merchant power supply manufacturers using TI parts. TI says that it doesn’t want to make decisions for its customers in the merchant power supply space. (Keep in mind that Power-One a major player in that space.) The license also extends to TI power modules.

...Read More

TI’s alternative energy blog, TInergy, has a mild rant on the common-but-mostly-useless $/W metric often used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of solar power systems. Common wisdom says that when solar panels reach $1/W they will reach cost parity with grid electricity. However, $/W for the solar panel doesn’t taking into account variations in cell efficiency, inverter efficiency, control electronics, and installation costs. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, we all get our electricity bills with rates listed in $/kWh, which can vary widely (in addition to being tiered); $.10/KWh is a good number. $/kWh is the real rate we use to evaluate whether solar power is cost-effective, and it requires knowledge of the efficiencies of each pi...Read More

The next wave of IR screening devices is already appearing on the market. This post showed a first-generation IR screener at the Hong Kong airport, which dates back to the SRAS outbreaks of a few years ago.

Here’s  a line of fever screening devices that automatically detect the hottest temperature on a subject, and give off audible and visible alarms for an elevated temperature. The devices range from a hand- held infrared thermometer or a thermal imaging camera, to a high resolution thermal imaging system. From Wahl Instruments.

Here’s a repeat of the Hong Ko...Read More

Investment bank HSBC recently called battery makers, blessed with $2 billion in funding in the stimulus package, “one of the most compelling investment opportunities” in clean energy, according to the Wall Street Journal.

I had a conversation last week with Neil Maguire, VP of business development at Silicon Valley battery start-up Imara, and asked what this influx of money can mean to the US domestic battery companies. He agrees that the stimulus money, “is the [scale] of investment that could make a difference in building a battery industry in...Read More

Google continues to work on its power meter project to enable you to monitor your personal power consumption from your desktop. Yesterday they released screenshots of what the power monitoring widgets that reside on your Google home page might look like:

“Google’s Tom Sly also told the listeners on a call held to discuss the tool — among them utilities, device makers and press — that because Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org is running the PowerMeter program, the company is not developing a business model for it. Google is not charging the utility, the customer or the third-part...Read More

Why does Liam Casey, CEO of PCH International, a major integrator of Chinese manufacturing services, want to talk with DIY-types who display their projects at Maker Faire? Casey says PCH gets 80% of its business from large corporations, and 20% from start-ups – garage-level innovators of the type who display at Maker Faire -- and his gut feel is that successful products in the future will come from small start-ups. He was at Maker Faire suggesting that for Makers with an entrepreneurial spirit who are ready to make the jump to volume manufacturing, manufacturing in Shenzhen – which Casey claims has the leanest supply chain in the world – is the most cost-effective way to get products to market. As Casey says, “Use your strengths where ...Read More

There’s a great opportunity to hear Liam Casey, mastermind of global manufacturing, speak this weekend at Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. I first came across Casey in an Atlantic Monthly article written by the excellent James Fallows who gave Casey the honorific, Mr. China, as “a campy way of indicating the person most in touch with the Chinese trends of this exact moment.”

I think of Maker Faire as a gathering of people who passionately...Read More

Systems often need some form of  non-volatile RAM to protect against memory losses caused by system power interruption or loss.  Battery-backed RAM has been the most common form of high-density non-volatile memory, but it has drawbacks, such as long charging times for the battery, a large size, a relatively low-temperature operating environment, requiring low-temperature operation, and limited number of cycles. 
AgigA Tech’s AGIGARAM non-volatile system technology provides memory capacity ranging from 4MB to  2GB with transfer rates equivalent to DRAMs by combining synchronous DRAM with flash memory. During normal oper...Read More

A couple of years ago Powercast made the news through its installation in the Pittsburg zoo of RF-transmitted power for a wireless sensor network in the penguin exhibit.

Here’s an excerpt from an EDN article that mentioned Powercast’s technology: “Powercast has developed the Powercaster transmitter and Powerharvester receiver chips operating at 900 MHz, through which you can broadcast and receive energy. Their range is several meters, and the power level is as much as 100 mW. This low power level may not be the restriction it seems: If your device, such as a node on a wireless-sensor network, has periods of higher power needs followed by long sleep states, consider adding batteries to the device and use the RFpower ...Read More

Akros Silicon cannily plays the efficiency card with its new AS1854 POE PD (powered device) IC – both energy and space efficiency. Akros claims that the integration of parts into the 1854 PD controller platform accounts for greater than 75% savings in board space, and 25% in BOM savings.The chip enables higher power efficiency with its GreenEdge synchronous rectification, which the company claims can yield an greater than 8% improvement in efficiency in the 6-8W “sweet spot” range that’s typical for VOIP phones, currently the most common application for POE. GreenEdge digital isolation technology also provides 2kV on-chip isolation, eliminating the need for opto-isolators that add cost, space and reduce system reliability. Is...Read More

Regular PowerSource readers may remember Jeff Tsao, a researcher at Sandia National Labs who posited that , because light has historically been a fixed percentage of the world’s GDP, increasing lighting efficiency (through more efficient technology such as LEDs, aka solid-state lighting) will result in more lighting used, rather than a decrease in power usage.  There was a brisk exchange of opinions in the comments section: Suffice it to say that many readers thought Tsaos’s position was a lot of hooey because it’s intuitively obvious that more efficient lights will result in less energy used.

It turns out that in 1865, ...Read More

You may be familiar with the Kill-a-Watt power meter. It plugs into an ac outlet and allows you to measure the Watts or VAC used by appliances powered from that outlet. It  pretty much dominates the personal power meter market at this time, and costs about $20.

Today, Teridian Semiconductor, which previously has played only in the big utility-level power meter IC market, announced its 78M6612 power and energy measurement chip for home and enterprise use. The chip is for a single-phase AC power and includes a 32-bit compute engine, an MPU core, real-time clock and flash memory. It offers a 22-bit delta-sigma ADC, 4 analog inputs, digital temperature compensation, and a precision voltage reference to support a wide range of single phase, dual outlet power measurem...Read More