ST-Ericsson introduces the first fully integrated wireless charger for mobile phones with the PM2020

With usual battery life of only a few hours, smartphones require to be charged almost daily. Thus, easy and often charging method is becoming more and more expected by end users. Wireless charging is typically answering to this request.

Today, wireless charging consists of a charging pad and a charging receiver inside the portable device. By dropping this portable device on the “pad”, it initiates automatically the charging of the battery.

To address this growing market, ST-Ericsson has announced the PM2020. The PM2020 integrates the WPC (Wireless Power Consortium) protocol, wireless energy control and a full DC/DC battery charger – an industry first. This integration allows “ready-to-integrate” solution for a mobile phone platform. The WPC receiver can be set in parallel with other charging methods (like USB) and behaving completely independently.

This integration also offers a very robust communication quality with the transmitter. As WPC protocol is fully part of the charging algorithm, the rectified energy is not polluted by the application loads and transients resulting in best-in-class packet error rate (0.1-0.3%).

Lastly, this integration enables to maximize the energy conversion efficiency in all uses cases. In the ST-Ericsson PM2020, the common control of WPC protocol and battery charger ensures that energy requested to the transmitter is permanently aligned with the application needs. Maximum energy is transmitted when battery is empty and no energy is transmitted when battery is full.

Last but not least, safety is a priority of the PM2020. With wireless charging, energy is transmitted by magnetic induction and captured by the receiver thru a coil. Unfortunately, unexpected objects badly placed between transmitter and receiver, like a coin for example, may capture also some energy. To prevent this, the PM2020 offers energy loss predictability and thus foreign object detection thanks to best-in-class energy measurements.

With products like the ST-Ericsson PM2020, we believe that 2012 should be the year of take-off in term of volume of this new technology.