News

Development Platform for Tightly-Coupled, Multi-Device Wireless Charging

April 05, 2019 by Paul Shepard

NuCurrent announced the release of its NuEva Development Platform for tightly-coupled, multi-device wireless charging systems. The platform leverages the company's patented magnetics technologies, advanced design tools, system software and engineering expertise to provide a solution for companies who want multi-device charging on a single pad.

In wake of Apple's AirPower failure, NuCurrent provides a solution that addresses challenges found in powering different devices on a single charging surface.

The platform uses a tightly-coupled wireless charging approach, offering advantages to the Qi-based solutions available in the market today. This design delivers up to 25W of power to multiple devices with varying receiver sizes, while providing a significant improvement in user experience due to the enhanced freedom of placement on the charging surface. Because of these advantages, certain aspects of this NuEva platform are currently being considered for adoption by the Wireless Power Consortium, which oversees the Qi standard.

The NuEva Development Platform includes essential system development tools that accelerate wireless power solution development. And it addresses the biggest challenges in wireless power including:

  • Magnetics & Simulation
  • Coil Tuning
  • FOD
  • Integrated Circuits
  • Shielding
  • Testing & Validation

"AirPower was meant to charge multiple devices with different power requirements and different sized receivers, simultaneously," said NuCurrent VP of Sales and Marketing Tim Tumilty. "This produces multiple, overlapping technical challenges not the least of which are heat management and circuitry control. These are similar to the types of problems we see with our Fortune 1000 customers, and NuEva is key to solving those challenges."

The NuEva Development Platform addresses the underlying challenges found in designing multi-device, single pad charging solutions. These include: magnetics, tuning, power conversion, foreign object detection, integrated circuits/firmware, shielding and communications. The platform supports a variety of product categories including smartphones, smart apparel, AR/VR systems, vaporizers/e-pens, and wrist-worn devices.

"Many companies try to launch wireless power solutions on their own and fail, because they don't know what challenges to look for," said Tumilty. "Apple is certainly not the first, just the most public. At NuCurrent, we are often called in to "fix" problems once companies realize that wireless charging is nuanced and hard. Our NuEva Development Platform gives us and our customers the opportunity to design together from the beginning, with a strong foundation that gets products to market faster, with more certainty, and better performance."