The development of products that apply batteryless energy harvesting technology to small applications is becoming popular. Energy harvesting, which improves user convenience and management cost efficiency, is gaining attention, and controllers that integrate related functions are also being released actively.

Infineon Technologies (hereinafter referred to as Infineon) announced on the 4th that it is launching the NFC tag controller NGC1081. This new single-chip solution enables IoT companies to develop small, low-cost smart edge computing and sensing devices, and it is said to make it easy to develop passive smart devices that operate in IoT applications using an NFC-based sensing controller with integrated energy harvesting capabilities.

These devices can be controlled and powered using a smartphone, and are said to have a wide range of applications, including medical patches, disposable field testers, data loggers, smart thermostats, and sensor inlays.

The tag controller supports two power supply functions: it can operate in passive mode (no battery) based on energy harvesting, or in battery-operated mode, operating as a standalone sensing node via a 3-3.3 V external power supply.

In passive mode, the entire sensing system, including the IC and the connected sensor, can draw power by harvesting energy from the NFC field of the mobile phone. This capability, combined with the galvanically isolated sensing interface, enables a wide range of sensing use cases that require no batteries and minimal maintenance. This is particularly useful for applications where the power supply must be galvanically isolated to meet safety regulations.

This NFC tag controller is based on a low-power ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller and integrates several other key components. Among them, the NFC front end meets the ISO14443 Type-A standard, and the motor control driver adopts an H-bridge circuit, which can drive a current of up to 250 mA. In addition, the NGC1081 features a sensing unit based on a 12-bit SAR ADC providing four analog inputs and a 10-bit DAC providing one analog output. The sensing unit also includes an I2V converter and a temperature sensor. The accuracy of the temperature sensor is ±0.3°C from 0°C to 45°C and ±0.4°C from -20°C to 0°C and 45°C to 85°C.

The highly integrated single-chip solution enables customers to reduce product size and system bill of materials (BOM) costs when developing smart sensing devices. In addition, the clear IC architecture and well-designed hardware/software partitioning enable fully flexible software-defined functions. The controller is highly configurable and versatile, making it easy to adapt to the needs of various applications and systems.

In addition, it is characterized and emphasized that it can be seamlessly connected to smartphones and can apply cloud-based business models. To this end, it supports a simple and scalable mailbox concept, so it is suitable for robust access management and maintaining data integrity and security. It was added that the protocol layer can also be extended using specific-purpose commands and messages from the open protocol interface.