Atmosic Technologies Raises US$28.5 Million in Series B Funding in a Boost to Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Solutions

Atmosic Technologies recently announced that it had raised US$28.5 million in its Series B funding, bringing the total to nearly US$50 million since the company was founded in 2016. The funding will be utilized to help deploy its innovative M2 and M3 Bluetooth 5 System-On-Chips (SoCs) within commercial products in 2020 and fund Research and Development (R&D) for next-generation products as it continues to differentiate by offering some of the lowest power consuming wireless chipsets across a variety of consumer and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

One challenge that continues to hinder IoT deployments is the feasibility of deploying potentially thousands of battery-powered sensors or tags that require considerable time and effort to maintain. Whether one talks of billions or even trillions of connected devices, in either scenario, the installed base of these battery-powered devices is anticipated to be enormous. Some companies have estimated that, in a trillion-sensor world, 913 million batteries would need to be replaced each day. Meanwhile, within a deployment of 10,000 a maintenance team would be required to replace around 9 batteries per day, equating to 2.25 hours per day to locate, change, and dispose of the drained batteries. The ultimate aim of companies like Atmosic, Everactive, Wiliot, and others is to develop ultra-low-power solutions that can be deployed and forgotten about, giving devices a forever battery life that lasts the entire lifespan of a device, or allowing them to operate without needing batteries altogether.

Atmosic launched its first ultra-low-power Bluetooth solutions in October 2018, consisting of its M2 and M3 series Bluetooth 5 platforms. It’s M3 series in particular focuses on three key innovations: Lowest Power Radio, On-demand Wake-Up, and Controlled Energy Harvesting. The company claims that Lowest Power Radio enhancements can result in 10X lower power than other Bluetooth 5-based products. In addition, the On-demand Wake-Up feature enables the radio to detect incoming transmissions in an ultra-low-power state and wake up fully when it is required, resulting in up to 100X lower power. Finally, Controlled Energy Harvesting in the M3 series harvests energy from Radio Frequency (RF) to enable battery-free operation in conjunction with these other enhancements. Atmosic’s M3 solution was also recently recognized as a Best of Innovation Honoree for the 2020 CES Innovation Awards in the Embedded Technologies category, and the company is targeting a number of applications including wearables, asset trackers, beacons, remote controls, keyboards, and mice, among others.

However, Atmosic is not the only chipset vendor seeking to provide ultra-low-power wireless solutions across a number of different technologies. Other companies, such as Ambiq Micro, Everactive, Wiliot, and others, are also working on ultra-low-power wireless solutions for various consumer and IoT applications.

Wiliot recently demonstrated a sticker-sized Bluetooth sensor tag that incorporates an Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) processor and is powered solely by scavenging energy from ambient RF from Wi-Fi Access Points (APs), smartphones, and other Bluetooth signals. These postage stamp-sized sensor tags can be glued to an antenna printed on plastic or paper to transmit encrypted serial numbers alongside weight and temperature information to help authenticate a product and its condition. Wiliot is targeting a number of use cases for the technology, including tracking and traceability in manufacturing environments, asset tracking, cold chain, delivery verification, anti-counterfeiting, retail, automatic replenishment, and product information and instructions, among others. The technology is still very much in the prototype phase, and the first version of the technology is expected to have a range of 1 to 2 meters. For the next version, Wiliot is hoping that it can reach between 10 and 20 meters. Following successful tests of the technology, Wiliot has raised US$30 million in its Series B round of funding with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Samsung Venture, and Avery Dennison, bringing the total to US$50 million after initial investments in 2017. Wiliot will continue to develop and perfect its solution while making its energy harvester more sensitive to weaker signals in order to improve range. The company also plans to improve its sensing capabilities and security. The technology was made available for sampling to early adopters in 2019 and is expected to be made widely available in 2020.

Innovation in power consumption is also occurring in the Wi-Fi chipset space, with a number of chipset vendors seeking to reduce the power consumption of Wi-Fi in order to provide extended battery life from months to years. Alongside Target Wake Time (TWT) enhancements in Wi-Fi 6, ABI Research believes that Wi-Fi chipset suppliers should also investigate opportunities that Wi-Fi 6 can open when combined with the upcoming 802.11ba (Wake-up Radio) enhancement for further reduced power consumption in emerging IoT device types. With 802.11ba, it is being proposed that Wi-Fi devices could integrate a companion low-power wake-up receiver. This acts as a basic receiver without any transmit capabilities which remains active while the main Wi-Fi radio is switched off. This Low-Power Wake-Up Receiver (LP-WUR) will then wake up the main Wi-Fi radio when a packet is received, and all data will be transmitted and received via the main radio. This could enable IoT devices to have both low-latency and a longer battery life using Wi-Fi, opening up new possibilities for ultra-low-power consumption devices. The targeted power consumption for the LP-WUR is <1 mW and the enhancement is set to be completed in 2020.

Other startup companies, such as InnoPhase, are working on unique radio architectures to provide lower power solutions. InnoPhase’s main innovation is around its digital polar transceiver, which replaces a number of traditional analog-based radios that leverage Cartesian coordinates, alongside a flexible low-noise amplifier and digital power amplifier. It claims that its solution will result in devices with much lower power consumption and is able to support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), Long-Term Evolution (LTE), and other wireless standards, including 5G. According to InnoPhase, compared to the traditional Wi-Fi solutions on the market, its solution can result in battery-powered devices lasting between 2 and 8X longer. On February 13, 2019, InnoPhase announced the Talaria TWO Platform, a multi-protocol single chip solution supporting both 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 5. Earlier in December 2019, the company announced that home automation solution provider Sunsa had selected InnoPhase’s Talaria TWO chipset for a new automated smart blinds product, enabling more than a year’s battery life on standard AA batteries with the ability to simply connect to the existing home Wi-Fi network. The Talaria TWO wireless platform is anticipated to be in mass production by March 2020

The vision of devices with a battery lifespan that lasts as long as the product itself, or without the need for a battery at all, has the potential to be very transformative. One of the major challenges of the IoT has remained that of power consumption and the need for battery replacement or recharging, particularly within commercial or industrial applications, such as building automation, Real-Time Location System (RTLS) deployments, or wireless sensor networks. ABI Research believes Atmosic’s and others’ solutions will be even more appealing for low-power sensor devices and location tag use cases. On the consumer side, wearable devices could greatly benefit from extended battery life, and battery-free peripherals and remote controls are very appealing. ABI Research believes that power consumption and energy harvesting will be increasingly important differentiators across various consumer and IoT applications, while these companies are well placed to take advantaged of strong anticipated growth for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi across numerous applications with low power requirements in the years to come.