IoT energy harvesting firm gets another $10m in Series A

Netherlands energy harvesting chip firm Nowi has added further cash to its Series A funding – from Disruptive Technology Ventures (DTV), which also injected money with the Dutch Government in 2018.

IoT energy harvesting firm gets another $10m in Series A

“This new $10m series A round of funding enables Nowi to further grow the team and complete the transition from start-up to a mature organisation, while still retaining a majority position in the company,” said Nowi CEO Simon van der Jagt. “As we launch our NW-A2.3 energy harvesting product in the first half of 2020 we will further expand our commercial activities. This also enables collaborations with partners with a longer time horizon.”

This chip is intended to power IoT nodes, and similar loads, from several different energy sources including solar cells, using ‘maximum peak power tracking’ (MPPT) to get the best out of the power source, whatever the incident energy.

“It can interface with various harvesters and essentially functions as a voltage boosting dc-dc converter,” van der Jagt told Electronics Weekly. “Our MPPT is highly adaptive and will change it’s own settings to adapt to a different source.
This can be temperature gradients, piezo and in some cases RF.”

Peak power tracking is the gold-standard technique for getting maximum power from energy sources with current-voltage characteristics that vary with incident energy – satellites use it to get the best from their solar cells. It is not trivial to implement, and sub-par techniques have been branded ‘MPPT’ to get the cachet without all the effort.

Is Nowi’s the real deal?

“Yes it has true MPPT,” said van der Jagt. “Our MPPT looks at the output power of the converter itself and we change the converter parameters accordingly. Whereas others typically only look at the output of the photovoltaic cell. We see that in practise this yields much better results. Furthermore, it is able to adapt within milliseconds whereas others typically take 10-20 seconds.”

He went on to explain that a when the source changes – because the angle of the light to a wearable’s photovoltaic cell has changed as the wearer moved, for example – a fast response is needed or the tracker will lag – always adapting and never reaching the optimal operating point. “We have managed to solve this issue,” he said.

NW-A2.3 at a glance

  • No external coil required, only one capacitor and no other external components.
  • MPPT settling in 1ms
  • <50nA leakage
  • 1.1Vin minimum for 2.5Vout
  • 5V max output
  • Voltage boosting up to 2.3x
  • Up to 90% dc-dc efficiency
  • To follow: NW-A10 with 300mV minimum input and 10x boost.

Prototype silicon exists and is with partners. “Later in 2020 this will become available in higher volumes”, said van der Jagt.

Delft-based Nowi was founded in 2015.

Photo: Nowi founders and Simon van der Jagt (right) and Omar Link


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