HaiLa Technologies Releases Extreme Low-Power Development Platform for Wi-Fi Communications

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HaiLa Technologies, a supplier of advanced low power wireless semiconductor solutions, introduced a new development platform to better support developers and researchers in creating extremely low power connected solutions.

The HaiLa EVAL2000 development board features the HaiLa BSC2000 Passive Backscatter on Wi-Fi chip combined with ST Microelectronics’ ultra-low power MCU, the STM32U0.

Leveraging off-the-shelf Wi-Fi infrastructure, HaiLa’s BSC2000 allows system architects to easily create extremely low-power designs with connectivity to any sensor. The EVAL2000 offers GPIO, I2C and SPI sensor interfaces. Sensor integration is done in firmware on the MCU. The EVAL2000 will be shown at CES with the ST Microelectronics ISM330ISN Motion Sensor.

"The EVAL2000 development kit enables rapid prototyping for a wide range of connected sensor applications over Wi-Fi,” stated Patricia Bower, VP Product Management at HaiLa. “The kit leverages ST Microelectronics’ lowest-power processor, allowing developers to showcase IoT device data communication with unprecedented, extremely low power consumption.”

As demand soars for connected devices, the need to address their environmental impact is critical. The largest contributor to power consumption in battery-powered Wi-Fi devices is typically the radio. HaiLa’s achievements in aggressively reducing radio power will help tackle the growing challenge of battery waste attributed to IoT devices.

Passive backscatter over Wi-Fi paves the way to reducing power for connected devices to near zero-energy. HaiLa’s backscatter adaptation uses a fraction of the power of typical Wi-Fi radio architectures, enabling both smaller batteries, a single battery over product life, or no battery at all by leveraging harvested energy.

The EVAL2000 reference design is also offered as a power- and size-optimized EVAL3000, which allows the system to operate battery-free, relying on harvested ambient light energy. The EVAL3000 sensor tag design consumes 60µW at a 5 second sensor polling interval.