HiSilicon and Nowi Announce New, More Compact Energy-Harvesting NB-IoT Reference Design

HiSilicon, Huawei's semiconductor division, and Nowi have announced a new NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT) reference design based on solar energy harvesting — allowing "plug and forget" operation without battery maintenance or external wired power, even indoors.

First spotted by CNX Software, the Energy Autonomous NB-IoT Platform v2 - the second generation product of the partnership between HiSilicon, which provides the compute, and Nowi, which provides energy harvesting capabilities — is a considerable upgrade from the companies' original launch. The revised board is more compact, measuring just 5.5x3.5cm (around 2.17x1.38") while supporting operation both indoors and outdoors when harvesting power from small photovoltaic solar cells.

There are a couple of caveats there, of course. The first is that moving the unit indoors halves the number of expected transmissions per day from six to just three. The second is that those six-or-three transmissions per day depend on the size of photovoltaic cell fitted to the device — meaning that more compact designs may find themselves able to transmit less often.

"Many IoT applications require super long deployment lifecycles and direct power connectivity is often not possible," claims HiSilicon's Charles Sturman of the launch. "As such, energy autonomy is becoming an important factor. Our collaboration with Nowi addresses these demands as their next generation NH2 device reaches efficiency and size targets which are changing the rule-book on Energy Harvesting."

"From industrial IoT to Smart Home applications we see a strong need for ease-of-use, reduction in device maintenance and small form factor solutions," adds Nowi's Simon van der Jagt. "As such, integrated energy harvesting solutions are playing a key role in the future of connectivity. Nowi's energy harvesting power management technology uniquely offers these advantages owing to its extremely small PCB assembly footprint, top energy harvesting performance and ease of implementation. We are excited to team up with HiSilicon and help customers on their way by offering the schematics of this new reference design platform."

The reference design is based on a HiSilicon Hi2115 NB-IoT chip, built into a Quectel BC95 module, partnered with Nowi's NH2 power management chip. Availability, however, has not yet been confirmed beyond a targeted mass production run in the fourth quarter of the year; pricing, equally, has yet to be confirmed.