Everything is Smart, Even Rubbish

Author:
Ally Winning, European Editor, PSD

Date
09/30/2022

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Ally Winning, European Editor, PSD

It has been a busy month for me, with lots of meetings, many of which are featured in our weekly TechTalk newsletter. I think it is a great new format, which I’m enjoying producing. We’ve had some really good content over the last month, including an interview with Marco Palma from EPC on the hidden benefits of using GaN devices in motor drives and another with Frederik Dostal from Analog Devices on making the integration of supercapacitors easier. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please take a look. Also if your own company has an innovation it would like highlighted in the newsletter, please get in touch. It is always great to hear about the latest things that the industry is working on. 

The Special Report in this month’s magazine is powering the Internet of Things. The IoT has grown at a rapid pace and is now integrated into almost every part of our daily lives. We use it to track our fitness through our smart watches, and our health, also through smart watches along with other sensors. We use the IoT to control the products in our homes, and even to see who is at the front door, from wherever we are in the world. It also makes our workplaces more productive and efficient. The success of the IoT relies on sensors embedded almost everywhere. Many of these sensors are situated in locations that are hard to access to change batteries. In situations like these, and in fact any application that needs batteries, the design of the circuit has to use as little power as possible. In the first article in the Special Report, Sanjay Rajasekhar, and Arvind Shankar from Analog Devices tell us about high-Z technology. High-Z technology is the ideal way of connecting sensors to the signal chain as it makes the ADC input easy to drive, without consuming static or continuous power. Technologies like this prolong battery life and minimize the size of circuits, essential for IoT applications.

The second article in this month’s Special Report comes from Murata. In the article, the company’s Tsuyoshi Yamashita (Murata), along with Johannes Ollech from customer Sentinum, describe a case study about using the IoT in rubbish collection. As many councils and municipalities see budgets stretched, the IoT can even make rubbish collection more efficient by signalling when bins are full to allow the most efficient route to be calculated for collectors. The sensor clusters used in applications like this have to be extremely rugged, with long operating lifetimes.

As well as the Special Report, this month’s magazine contains a selection of general power-focussed articles in out Tech Focus section, along with news and views from the industry. I hope you enjoy. 

 

Best Regards,

Ally Winning

European Editor, PSD

Ally@powersystemsdesign.com

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