Backscatter WiFi board for ultra low power IoT
HaiLa Technologies in Canada has launched a development platform for ultra low power WiFi using passive backscatter technology.
The EVAL2000 development board uses the HaiLa BSC2000 Passive Backscatter on WiFi chip combined with the low power STM32U0 microcontroller from ST Microelectronics.
The BSC2000, developed with Presto Engineering and shown at CES last year, allows system architects to easily create extremely low-power designs with connectivity to any sensor using existing WiFi infrastructure. The EVAL2000 board, shown at CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas, provides GPIO, I2C and SPI sensor interfaces and the sensor integration is done in firmware on the MCU.
Researchers propose backscatter technique for low-power IoT
“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.”
The largest contributor to power consumption in battery-powered Wi-Fi devices is typically the radio. HaiLa passive back scatter signal capture significantly reduces the radio power to help tackle the growing challenge of battery waste attributed to IoT devices. This 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 using 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.
HaiLa has been working with Belgian energy harvesting chip designer e-peas to power a WiFi node from a solar cell.
Jacobs and its UK subsidiary PA Consulting have been testing the Haila backscatter technology at the PA Consulting Global Innovation & Technology Centre in the UK. A sensor module using HaiLa backscatter over WiFi drew approximately 70 times less current compared to a commercial sensor module that uses conventional WiFi communications.
Jacobs also conducted the environmental assessment of HaiLa chip technology using a life-cycle approach. The results indicate a 14 times reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and estimate that the ecosystem impact of the HaiLa Wi-Fi chip, compared to conventional Wi-Fi, may be reduced by 98%.
The HaiLa BSC2000-EVAL2000 and EVAL3000 kits are available for pre-order with shipping anticipated for Q1 2025.
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