What is Green Technology?

What is Green Technology?

by Cees Links, ZigBee RF4CE Marketing Chair and CEO of GreenPeak

Everyone talks about recycling, ROHS, etc. but no one really address the issues of the that batteries used to power a wide range of industrial and electronic devices. Disposable batteries are a leading pollution issue. In addition to the large amounts of power required for mining and refining the raw materials, manufacturing and then disposal, batteries are also filled with heavy metals and toxic chemicals. These provide difficult and expensive disposal and recycling challenges.

What are the leading industry technologies and developments that will help us reduce the number of batteries our devices consume?

As we all know, progress is not a straight line…

Just like medicine, technology can have unintended side effects and it is not unusual that good ideas need a second look.

One interesting example is wireless technology. No one can imagine a world anymore without portable gear: phones, laptops, cameras, navigation systems, etc. Fortunately these products run on rechargeable batteries, and usually these batteries have a lifetime that exceeds the lifetime of the product.

However, product development has not stopped with these products and in particular with the arrival of wireless sense and control networking products, the appetite for batteries is continuously increasing. One can think of remote controls, security systems, thermostats, weather stations, and so on.

To give an impression of the size of the problem a quick calculation on remote controls: every year around 500 million remotes are being shipped, usually with two batteries. So, year after year 1 billion batteries are brought into circulation for remote controls alone, and not only brought into circulation – also taken out of circulation, with about the same rate...

To further put things in perspective, the lifetime of a remote control is about 10 years and in that period a remote control "consumes" on average 1 battery per year. So every year 5 billion batteries are put into the environment just to only deal with our desire to remotely control something!

At GreenPeak, we have decided to indeed give this challenge a second look. The arrival of the ZigBee RF4CE standard and the transition of "good old" IR remote controls towards the much more advanced and versatile radio based (RF) remote controls has created an opportunity to reduce this 5 billion number by a factor 10. This substantial improvement is based on the fact that it is now technically possible to have a remote control that can operate on a single battery for more than 10 years, exceeding the life span of the remote control itself.

ZigBee – the low power spin-off of Wi-Fi – has the same range as Wi-Fi, allowing longer distances up to 100 feet away from the TV or STB. This means that these wireless controlled devices can now conveniently be located out of sight or even out of the room. The superior range and performance also allows for operators to offer additional multi-room services as security, lighting control and/or energy management, etc.

On top of that ZigBee RF4CE offers a range of built in standardized features to support remote controls (ZRC), keyboards and mice for Internet TV (ZID), and 3D glasses for 3D television (Z3S). These features all include the exciting capability of ultra long battery life as provided by ZigBee, making changing batteries rare or redundant, when the battery life can even exceed the life of the product.

ZigBee RF4CE also provides long range interoperability – enabling the TV set and set top box, and associated home automation, power management and security applications, to talk to the home owner anywhere in the home and through gateways from everywhere over the world via the internet.

Cees Links is a pioneer of the wireless LAN industry, a visionary leader bringing the world of mobile computing and continuous networking together. With his leadership, the first wireless LANs were developed which ultimately became house-hold technology integrated into the PC's and notebooks we all use today.  His group also pioneered the development of access points, home networking routers and hotspot base stations, all widely used today.

GreenPeak (http://www.greenpeak.com) is a fabless semiconductor company and is a leader in ultra low power wireless and battery-free communication technology for consumer electronics and wireless sense and control applications. This revolutionary technology, based on the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless networking standard, utilizes energy harvesting to facilitate battery-free operation in a totally wireless environment, without the need for either communications or power connectivity.