Nikkei Electronics Asia -- December 2009
Features
Wireless Power Transfer Goes Commercial

WiTricity Corp of the US is a high-tech start-up founded to commerciality "WiTricity" technology, capable of wirelessly transferring electric power using magnetic resonance over distances from tens of cm to several meters. The firm was founded in 2007 by Prof Marin Soljacic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the US. Many manufacturers have already expressed strong interest in WiTricity, including Intel Corp of the US, Qualcomm Inc of the US and Sony Corp of Japan. We spoke with WiTricity president and chief executive officer (CEO) Eric Giler about his firm's strategy (Fig 1). 

First, what are the objectives of your company, WiTricity? Do you plan to collect profit from intellectual property (IP) management, licenses and the like?

Our goal is to commercialize WiTricity technology as the standard for wireless power transfer. In addition to IP licensing, we will also manufacture our own components, and sell them under original equipment manufacturer (OEM) licenses to companies manufacturing mobile telephones, home electronics and automobiles, for example. One of the reasons I was appointed CEO of this firm was my strong background in the OEM business.

We are planning on handling our own component manufacturing because we want to make our technology the global standard. Making everything ourselves will make it a lot easier to assure interoperability.

We can also optimize component specs for specific applications. We can provide our OEM customers with reference designs while we continue development. Once full-scale volume production is under way, we can also license manufacturing.

When do you plan to start commercial supply?

In fact, we just moved up our shipment schedule. We had planned to sample-ship in 2010, but everything's about a year earlier now. I can't disclose the name of the companies involved, but we will be shipping sample components to manufacturers in the US and Japan in 2009. The first actual products using the components won't ship until after customer testing is complete, which probably means the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest.

When I say components here, I'm talking about the circuits from the transmitter radio frequency (RF) circuit to the receiver direct-current (DC)-DC converter (Fig 2). The RF circuit represents the core of our technology. It includes functions such as assuring a stable supply of electricity even when wireless transfer conditions are varied, such as the distance between the coupled resonators, or their relative positions.

The crucial thing with the resonators is to optimize shape and other characteristics to match the specific application. Parameters like resonator shape and size, frequency and range are all different for various applications, ranging from low power levels in a small case, like in a mobile phone, to medium power levels in televisions or personal computers, for example, and high-power applications like vehicles.

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