Intel
(INTC) has been working on wireless electricity technology for several years, which I wrote about earlier, that now works over longer distances. At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View CA, on 06-18-2009, the company showed off a new variation of the idea that power can be transmitted through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.
Intel now calls the technology Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL). Intel’s goal of the WREL project is to cut the power cord. Building on principles proposed by MIT physicists in 2006. The WREL team has lit a 60W light bulb at a range of several feet and with 70% efficiency.
WREL works in a fashion similar to the old 1970’s Memorex commercial staring Ella Fitzgerald where a singer can shatter a glass by hitting its natural frequency, at which it absorbs energy efficiently. In the case of WREL, a coil of wire with a natural frequency around 10MHz takes the place of the glass, and a similar coil takes the place of the singer.
The technology uses two flat copper coils tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. One wire releases electromagnetic energy and the other picks it up in much the same way an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at just the right pitch, said researcher Emily Cooper. The wireless electricity transmission shows the efficiency of 90 percent at distances of up to a meter, she said.
Intel hopes the technology will be useful for charging devices like netbooks or smartphones in a room without wires. Intel also predicts the technology could be used within devices such as a laptop. to replace the fallible wires that connect laptop screens through a hinge, Cooper said
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Intel admits that the next milestone for the WREL project is to build a rectifying circuit that can convert the RF power to DC power without upsetting the carefully tuned pair of coils. Intel has demonstrated they can charge a light bulb with 60W of wireless electricity which should be sufficient to charge a laptop.
However to power a laptop or charge a battery, Intel will need DC power, not a 10MHz AC signal. The need to drive down the power requirements for the next generation of computing devices is also helping drive Intel’s latest attempt to break into the UMPC process market with the Atom chips and the next-generation “Moorestown” processor which boasts lower energy consumption requirements. It is also notable that Intel has a stated long-term plan of 60watts power for mainstream desktop processors, down from a maximum consumption of 130 watts of the new Pentium Extreme Edition 840, according to Benson Inkley, a senior processor applications engineer, with Intel in an article at Tom’s Hardware.
While it seems that Intel is on a trajectory to cut the power requirements and costs of owning and operating a PC fleet, it will be a while. It is much more likely that Moorestown processors are going to be aided by the pending IEEE 802.3at POE+ specification which will allow up to at least 30W which can be used to charge devices. It is my guess that the reports of the demise of wired networking are greatly exaggerated until Intel figures out how to economically and safely deliver 60W through the vapor.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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