Slashing wireless power for the sensorized future
We are rapidly heading toward a world filled with ubiquitous AI-equipped, wirelessly connected sensors—tiny, intelligent watchers quietly embedded in almost everything.
These sensors will monitor the health of industrial machines, spotting worn bearings or motor imbalance long before a technician arrives. They’ll lurk behind the walls of smart buildings, adjusting heating, lighting, and airflow while detecting water leaks the instant they begin. They’ll keep vigil over infrastructure—bridges, railways, pipelines—looking for subtle signs of stress or corrosion. In fields and orchards, they’ll track crop health, soil moisture, and irrigation needs. In homes, they’ll keep watch for gas leaks, detect smoke, and alert you to faulty appliances.
Wearables will continuously analyze gait, respiration, sleep, and early indicators of illness. Vehicles will report tire pressure, brake wear, and road quality in real time, while energy systems use intelligent sensors to watch batteries, transformers, solar panels, and wind turbines. Even mundane objects—doors, locks, streetlights, trash bins, refrigerators, and toilets—will gain enough local intelligence to recognize patterns, save energy, improve safety, reduce waste, and make life just a little bit easier.
Many of these smart sensors will be powered by small batteries or by harvesting ambient energy from their surroundings—tiny trickles from temperature changes, air pressure shifts, light, vibration, or movement.
Some companies concentrate on creating low-power MEMS sensors, while others focus on ultra-low-power AI inference engines. But there’s an elephant in the room—the wireless communications portion of the system can consume thousands of times more power than the sensor and inference engines combined.
HaiLa’s passive backscattering technology on Wi-Fi
The solution may be HaiLa Technologies’ bi-static passive backscattering technology. Instead of generating their own Wi-Fi (or Bluetooth) packets, which requires a lot of energy, HaiLa’s device acts like the wireless equivalent of a mirror, simply reflecting passing packets while also modulating the reflected signal with additional information. This process consumes only ~5 to 10µW average power, which is low enough to run a sensor for 15–20 years on a single CR2032 battery cell or even operate battery-free using harvested RF energy.