Low power sensor nodes using NB-IoT, LoRa or BLE often need to operate for 10+ years without any battery changes.

Energy harvesting can enable ‘Plug & Forget’ beacons which are entirely maintenance-free for the duration of the application.

In many cases this dramatically reduces the sensor systems total cost of ownership. The cost of battery maintenance in high volume sensor systems often exceeds the purchasing cost of the system.

This is mostly due to the labor costs involved and to a smaller extend the physical battery costs.

These sensor nodes often are highly cost driven and have small form factors, this makes the 94% BOM reduction for the energy harvesting PMIC part of Nowi’s solution especially important in these use-cases.

Together with HiSilicon’s NB-IoT Nowi has shown that even minimal light exposure is sufficient to frequently transmit messages without requiring any battery changes at all.