Consideration of peak power requirements via careful design and battery selection can dramatically increase battery runtime and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Most electronic devices exhibit a pulsing behavior, where peak power is much higher than standby power. This includes mobile (i.e., battery-operated) devices. Some common examples of battery-operated devices with pulsing behavior include:

• Wireless sensors that periodically transmit information across a long distance
• Electric hand tools and toys with actuating motors
• Bluetooth audio speakers with high dynamic range
• Medical-device pumps with backup-battery supplies

A major design goal for a mobile device is to maximize battery runtime (no one wants to face the ire directed at Apple over their phones’ battery problems). Typically, the largest design efforts to achieve this involve minimizing standby power through careful selection and implementation of components with low quiescent power. An example of products that do this well are biometric sensors powered by energy harvesting. However, there should be an equal emphasis on designing for peak power, because an inability to support these peaks will result in premature battery replacement.

As a battery loses charge, it diminishes its ability to deliver peak power. This is due to a property of batteries known as internal resistance. This resistance is modeled in series with the battery output, and is a function of the battery’s size, chemistry, age, temperature, and state of charge. Figure 1 shows an equivalent circuit of a battery driving a simple load, with internal resistance shown as parameter ‘r’.

1. Here’s an equivalent circuit of a battery driving a simple load, with internal resistance shown as parameter ‘r’.

As the internal resistance increases, more power is dissipated across it and less is available for the load. Eventually, the internal resistance becomes so large that the battery will not be able to deliver sufficient peak power, especially in a pulsing application. A significant factor of internal resistance is state of charge—as a battery becomes depleted, it increases internal resistance. This behavior is shown in Figure 2.

A pulsing application requires low internal resistance for proper function. For example, consider a scenario where a 3-V battery needs to periodically deliver 0.5 A to a pulsed load such as a smoke alarm. From analysis of Fig. 1, if the battery’s internal resistance is 3 Ω, then the voltage available for the motor is 3 – (3 × 0.5) = 1.5 V, and the motor would not run well at all. If the battery matched the behavior shown in Fig. 2, it would reach this bad state (internal resistance = 3 Ω) when it still had 60% capacity left and would already need to be replaced! This is an example of peak power limiting battery runtime. Ideally, a battery should be usable across its entire range of charge.

Fortunately, several design techniques can prevent this from happening:

1. Peak power pulses can be reduced by introducing large capacitors near the load circuit, by spreading out discharge energy over time. This ability is limited by the size and cost of the capacitors that the device can accommodate.

2. Peak power pulses can also be reduced by slowly ramping up (e.g., soft starting) the load. This is limited by the dynamic requirements of the circuit, and how slowly it can ramp up while still functioning well.

3. Series resistance within the circuit can be lowered through careful design of connectors, wiring, and PCB layout. For very high peak power devices like motors, a small reduction of 100 mΩ can have a noticeable effect. One pro tip is to avoid using battery “spring” connectors like those shown in Figure 3 for high-power applications. These connectors can have hundreds of milliohms of series resistance and thus have a detrimental impact on applications with motors.

5. Finally, choose the right battery for the application. Careful consideration should be paid to internal resistance over the life of the product, to prevent premature battery replacement. Good examples of variation are shown in Figures 4 and 5, which indicate significant differences in internal resistance for coin-cell and alkaline batteries.

3. Avoid battery spring connectors, like the ones pictured here, in high-power applications.

The HelmetFit product, a wireless air pump designed at Bresslergroup, employed several of these techniques to optimize performance and battery life. Careful selection of the internal pump (technique #4) and battery (technique #5) were combined with a soft-start algorithm (technique #2) to maximize battery life while delivering peak performance in all applications.

4. There are significant differences in internal resistance for coin-cell and alkaline batteries. Compare this chart showing alkaline AAA battery internal resistance (IR) vs. depth of discharge to that in Fig. 5. (Source: Radio Shack)

5. Choosing the right battery for the application is key to preventing premature battery replacement. This chart shows coin-cell 2450 battery internal resistance (IR) vs. depth of discharge. (Source: Energizer)

Internal resistance can prevent using the entire battery capacity in pulsing applications. Consideration must be given to peak power requirements, through prudent design and battery selection, to significantly boost battery runtime.

 (This article was first published in Electronic Design as Designing for Peak Power in Mobile Devices.)

Kevin Murphy

Senior Electrical Engineer

Kevin considers reliability to be every product’s legacy. « In the long run, nobody remembers the pains it took to create a product, » he says, « but users appreciate if it works every time. » At Bresslergroup, he’s responsible for electronic hardware and firmware design. He helps clients decide which state-of-the-art features to consider and then focuses on making them a reality. The most enjoyable moment of the process is when he first sees a complex design behave as he’d envisioned.

Medical or healthcare industry exists when our species exists. In modern times, our healthcare industry is far away from what we need. The doctor-patient ratio is over 25000:1 in some less developed area. In some developed country, the ratio is also over 200:1. Nowadays, people are finding a way to increase the number of patients that one doctor manage.

IoT(Internet of things) is the solution about that. With IoT medical devices, the doctors can take care of more patients. There are many benefits of IoT for hospitals and healthcare.

1.  Decreased Costs

When healthcare providers take advantage of the connectivity of healthcare solutions, patient monitoring can be done on a real-time basis, thus significantly cutting down on unnecessary visits by doctors. In particular, home care facilities that are advanced are guaranteed to cut down on hospital stays and re-admissions.

2.  Reduced Errors:

Accurate collection of data, automated workflows combined with data-driven decisions are an excellent way of cutting down on waste, reducing system costs and most importantly minimizing errors.

3.  Enhanced Patient Experience:

The connectivity of the health care system through the internet of things. places emphasis on the needs of the patient. That is, proactive treatments, improved accuracy when it comes to diagnosis, timely intervention by physicians and enhanced treatment outcomes result in accountable care that is highly trusted among patients.

With this solution, there are several advantage:

1. 1 or 2 doctors can manage hundreds of patients(Non-emergency condition)

2. Doctors needn’t collect the data from patients, and they can do more important work.

3. Compared with manual data collecting, the system is more efficient and accurate.

4. Doctors can read the historical record in the database. No worry about record missing.

Definition

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries, defined an MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. This validated learning comes in the form of whether your customers will actually purchase your product.

A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product (which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes) that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behavior with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.

Expected Benefits

The primary benefit of an MVP is you can gain understanding about your customers’ interest in your product without fully developing the product. The sooner you can find out whether your product will appeal to customers, the less effort and expense you spend on a product that will not succeed in the market.

Common Pitfalls

Teams use the term MVP, but don’t fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product.

Teams may also confuse an MVP–which has a focus on learning–for a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) or Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)–which has a focus on earning. There’s not too much harm in this unless the team becomes too focused on delivering something without considering whether it is the right something that satisfies customer’s needs.

Teams stress the minimum part of MVP to the exclusion of the viable part. The product delivered is not sufficient quality to provide an accurate assessment of whether customers will use the product.

Teams deliver what they consider an MVP, and then do not do any further changes to that product, regardless of feedback they receive about it.

Potential Costs

Proper use of an MVP means that a team may dramatically change a product that they deliver to their customers or abandon the product together based on feedback they receive from their customers. The minimum aspect of MVP encourages teams to do the least amount of work possible to useful feedback (Eric Ries refers to this as validated learning) which helps them avoid working on a product that no one wants.

Origins

2009: The concept of MVP gained popularity after Eric Ries described it in his book the Lean Startup

Signs of Use

A team effectively uses MVP as the core piece of a strategy of experimentation. They hypothesize that their customers have a need and that the product the team is working on satisfies that need. The team then delivers something to those customers in order to find out if in fact the customers will use the product to satisfy those needs. Based on the information gained from this experiment, the team continues, changes, or cancels work on the product.

Further Reading

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

From security issues to skills shortages, these are the most important Internet of Things things to look for in the new year.

1. IoT growth will continue — in devices, data, and investment

Well, duh. According to IDC, the IoT is going to stay hot, with investment expected to top $1 trillion by 2020, just one year after 2019. That will help fund a 30 percent annual growth rate in cellular IoT connections until 2023, per Ericsson (as reported in Forbes), which I calculate to result in about 1.3 billion connections in 2019. Looked at another way, IoT devices and services will reach an inflection point of 18 to 20 percent adoption in 2019, per DBS Asian Insights (pdf).

Heck, at this rate, 2019 might even be the year when average consumers finally get the message of what the IoT is actually all about, and why they should care.

2. 5G networks will make their presence felt

Sure, lots of IoT devices rely on low-powered, low-data-rate networks such as NB-IoT and Cat-M. But the rollout of of 5G networks will have a big effect on high-end IoT applications linked to robotics and automation, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

As Warren Chaisatien, Ericsson’s global director of IoT customer engagement marketing, said on the company blog, “5G will enhance the capabilities of edge and cognitive computing, which will be particularly vital to certain applications, like self-driving cars, where computing must be performed as close to the device as possible to reduce latency of decision making. The list of industries ready to take their businesses to the next level with 5G finally becoming available is long, including manufacturing, transport/logistics, public safety/emergency, and smart cities.”

3. IoT security will be a more important than ever

Put as simply as possible, the huge increase in the number of IoT devices in use pretty much automatically leads to an accompanying rise in security vulnerabilities. And more vulnerabilities leads to more attacks and more damage, in everything from smart homes to high-security government and corporate installations. In fact, weak security on many devices means the IoT isn’t just a victim of these attacks; it can also be used to create powerful botnets that hackers can leverage to carry out cyber attacks on the IoT and other targets. Panda Lab, for example, expects to see more attacks on IoT devices, routers, and Wi-Fi networks.

4. Big will be beautiful

Observers such as Data Art expect the biggest players to dominate the IoT marketin 2019 in a variety of ways. While platform vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google increase their footprint, other organizations will “flock to them for the promise of simplification at scale.” Similarly, Analysys Mason sees carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, and Vodafone remaining bullish about IoT.

While big IoT platforms battle for market share, we’ll see smaller players focus on niche areas to survive (e.g., data movement, industry-specific challenges, certain types of devices, etc.).

5. Some players will give up on IoT

At the same time, though, other firms may find they’re not up for the rough and tumble IoT market. This is already happening — to an extent — as evidenced by GE’s move to spin off its Predix IoT platform. Smaller players may have to focus on niches such as data movement, industry-specific challenges, and certain types of devices, according to Data Art.

But Analysys Mason expects small operators to face the hardest choices in supporting IoT: « Without the funds to invest in their own capabilities, they are stuck with unattractive options: sell connectivity (and compete largely on price) or also try to sell capabilities developed by others (but offer nothing unique). … Some operators, especially small single country operators or low-cost challengers, will simply invest elsewhere.”

6. The IoT skills shortage will continue

IDG Connect reports that according to a Canonical report, more than two-thirds of companies can’t hire the IoT experts they need, and Experis’ Tech Cities Job Watchreport says the demand for technology skills has jumped by a third due to the huge increase in connected IoT devices. Big data pros and cyber security experts are said to be in especially high demand, along with IT workers who have experience in device equipment, application development, and general utilization of IoT technology.

Clearly, there’s an opportunity here!

By Fredric Paul, Network World   https://www.networkworld.com/article/3330738/six-iot-predictions-for-2019.html

IOT DATA SECURED FOR EVER !

PRESS RELEASE
Ubirch presents a « Blockchain on a SIM » solution at MWC Barcelona 2019
21.02.2019, Cologne/Barcelona. « Blockchain on a SIM » – Under this motto, Ubirch presents its
award-winning blockchain-based technology from February 25th to 28th, 2019 for the first time,
at the MWC Barcelona (Mobile World Congress).
The Ubirch procedure works in a similar way to the notary’s certification and sealing of a
document. It seals the data directly within the device, only milliseconds after the measurement,
not after transmission in a cloud. The Ubirch client is extremely lightweight and efficient – so even
the smallest edge devices and even SIM cards can be used.
Stephan Noller, CEO of Ubirch: « The trustworthiness of the SIM-card in combination with the
Ubirch technology to secure IoT data – this can be a game changer for the industry, especially for
the protection of industrial equipment and critical infrastructures. »
At the Ubirch booth, visitors can see a demonstrator, which shows how the Blockchain solution
makes the Internet secure so that businesses and consumers can trust the delivered data of the
billions of devices which are connected to the internet.
Ubirch booth at MWC Barcelona: Hall 8 / booth 8.OG8
Ubirch CEO Stephan Noller is available for interviews at the exhibition stand on February 25th and
26th February in Barcelona.

Sequans has released the second generation of its LTE-M and NB-IoT chip platform called Monarch 2. The newer version is built on three years of Sequans’ exclusive and field-proven experience with first-generation Monarch platform, which is and has been the industry’s leading LTE for IoT chip since its introduction in 2016.

Monarch 2 incorporates full reuse of Monarch’s software and architecture, allowing all existing customers to migrate to the upgrade, seamlessly. It brings several significant advancements, including an integrated secure element (SE) with the industry’s highest level of security, enabling a variety of integrated SIMs, a 60-percent improvement in power consumption, beating the already industry-lowest level of Monarch, and an industry-leading high level of integration that further simplifies and lowers the cost of IoT device design.

According to Sequans’ CEO, Georges Karam, the Monarch 2 has been designed based on the exclusive knowledge gained over the last three years with IoT device-makers and LTE operators around the world. This experience has enabled the company to develop the new platform with real world knowledge of what customers need for successful LTE IoT deployments of all types. In Monarch 2, Sequans has answered key demands and improved the already ultra-low power consumption, added comprehensive positioning capabilities and a versatile MCU, and added other important features to validate and improve the business cases for the widest possible range of IoT applications.

Monarch 2 comes 5G ready. It supports 3GPP Release 14 and 15 and LTE UE categories M1/NB1/NB2. In a single chip, it integrates baseband, RF, RAM, MCU, and power management. It supports all power classes +23/20/14 dBm, allowing deployments by all operators around the world with efficient network capacity and data plans. The newer platform’s dedicated MCU is able to scale from ultra-low power to high-performance mode to best fit customer applications. It is open to all customers via Sequans’ SDK.

Monarch 2’s embedded secure element (SE) offers the highest, government-grade security level possible, EAL5+, and iUICC function. For positioning, it embeds Sequans Location Engine which provides indoor and outdoor positioning via GNSS and a wide range of LTE-based location technologies. The Location Engine gives application developers flexibility to select the geo-location technology that best fits their requirements for location accuracy and cost. The power consumption of Monarch 2 shows a 50-percent improvement in active mode and a 60 percent improvement in eDRX and idle modes, with rock bottom power consumption continuing to lead the industry at 1 micro amp.

The Monarch 2 will be seamlessly integrated into Sequans’ Monarch product portfolio which includes Monarch N – the single-mode NB-IoT version of Monarch, and Monarch SiP – an ultra-small and thin system-in-package that includes the universal radio front end of Skyworks and all other components required. Monarch has been certified by operators all over the world in USA, Japan, Europe, and Australia.

Key Features of the Monarch 2 Platform

• 3GPP Release 14 and 15; LTE UE categories M1/NB1/NB2
• Full forward compatibility of first-generation Monarch’s mature software for seamless migration
• IoT Select — dynamic LTE mode selection for LTE-M or NB-IoT
• Supports RF frequencies 617-2200 MHz, including support for LTE band 71
• Optimized for half-duplex FDD in a Single-SKU design for global deployment
• +23 dBm/+20dBm/+14dBm configurable FEM for optimized network capacity by limiting packet retransmission and providing superior coverage at cell edge or in-building/underground
• Dedicated MCU to support embedded customer application software and ultra-low power sensor-hub
• Ultra-low power consumption: Rock bottom power consumption of 1 micro amp, 60% reduction in eDRX and Idle modes, 50% reduction in active mode, eco-Paging — proprietary Sequans’ algorithm for lowest possible eDRX power consumption
• Integrated secure element (SE) with industry’s highest level of security EAL5+
• Embedded iUICC
• Embedded GNSS provides for concurrent LTE and GNSS operation, supporting multiple constellations
• Sequans Location Engine — supports both indoor and outdoor location services with or without GNSS
• Embedded voice processing acceleration for an optimized LTE-M VoLTE solution
• Single rail power supply input with range 2.2-5.5 V, allowing the use of standard AA batteries
• 215 pins CSP, 0.5 mm pitch, allowing low-cost PCB technology and enabling 65% size reduction

Download the product brief for more information.