On Tuesday, Seattle’s Jeeva, a venture-capital startup that emerged from an engineering lab at the University of Washington and has gone on to receive seed-stage funding from California venture capital fund rocketship.vc, announced a major energy breakthrough in chip production. The company has officially debuted its trademarked Parsair chip, which it says consumes 100 times less energy than the current (Bluetooth) industry standard. This, it says, marks a transformational reduction in power consumption that could enable sensors for Internet of Things (Iot) applications to be deployed densely, and at industrial scale.
“Until now, devices could continuously stream wireless data, rapidly draining their batteries, or could transmit data intermittently to try and stretch battery life.” said Jeeva CEO Scott Bright. “Parsair makes it possible to truly stream data without draining the battery, which will be game-changing for a lot of different industries and applications.”
Out of thin air
Prior to founding the company, Jeeva’s technical team worked together at the University of Washington on an award-winning paper for their work on ambient backscatter, a technique that turns existing, ambient wireless television and cellular signals (seemingly) “out of thin air” into a source of power (as well as a communication technology in itself). The team evolved this concept into two more award-winning academic papers on Passive WiFi and Interscatter. The team has also developed telecommunications hardware applications, building the first battery-free phone in 2017 and a range of low-power, battery-free HD video streaming devices in 2018.
Jeeva’s latest chip breakthrough, Parsair, enables communications using less energy-intensive “reflective” energy, instead of generating (“emitting”) its own radio signal. Specifically, a wireless router transmits radio signals which are then reflected by the chip, in order to communicate data. The reflected signal is made to look just like a standard radio packet in one of several supported radio protocols, so that it can integrate easily with commodity hardware and existing product systems.
The energy efficiency of this approach should make it possible to continuously stream data across a range of new devices in applications, from low power streaming audio devices, high bandwidth accelerometer sensors, or other highly interactive devices that can last for years on a small coin cell battery. The Parsair chip supports data rates up to 1,000 kbps and connected range up to 100 meters, at significantly lower power than any conventional radio and a silicon footprint of just over 1 square millimeter.
Besides streaming applications, Jeeva says its Parsair chip can be used to build wireless sensor networks for other industry verticals: Applications include consumable product monitoring and cold-chain tracing for perishable products and vaccines, as well as automated replenishment, inventory management, and asset proximity tracking in biotech.
“This chip provides low-latency, item-level data from places and things that were never before possible.” said Bright. “It shows the industry that it’s possible to sidestep conventional tradeoffs and get fully-featured wireless connectivity at very low power, and extremely low cost.”
ICYMI
News of the energy breakthrough for a single wireless chip follows other milestone chip news. Last week, IBM announced that it has developed the world’s first chip with a size of 2 nanometers, which it says could achieve 45 percent higher performance or 75 percent lower energy use than the standard 7-nanometer node chips currently in circulation. IBM said the applications could potentially slash the carbon footprint of data centers, quadruple cell phone battery life, speed up laptop functions, and accelerate detection time in autonomous vehicles.
