Make a Small 5W Wireless Power Transmitter

Wireless charging offers huge benefits beyond simply improving convenience in the smartphone space—for example, the option to eliminate connectors, make products waterproof, easier to clean, and more durable. In addition, the ability to transfer power, as well as improved safety in harsh environments, offers its own set of advantages. As a result, the technology has the potential to become more common in many applications beyond the smartphone space. One interesting thing about wireless power design is that engineers often encounter technical challenges, especially when they are first developing wireless power. Important system requirements such as power dissipation and foreign object detection (FOD) create design challenges. The ability to achieve WPC compliance, or simply ensure a good user experience, is largely determined by the components used, the type of coil, and the board layout. Recent advances in wireless charging technology make life easier for designers by providing higher levels of integration, improving efficiency by up to 5%, and reducing standby power consumption to only 25mW (even during polling). A new two-chip solution from Texas Instruments (TI) includes the bq500511, wireless power transmitter control, and the bq50002, analog front end. The bq50002 integrates all analog functions into the system, including FETs, drivers, current sensing, regulators and demodulation filters. The bq500511 handles the communications and WPC protocols. The advantage of using two chips is that it ensures that the digital components are in the digital processing and the analog components are in the analog processing - which in turn produces a very cost-effective solution; this solution can be used for WPC-based or proprietary transmitters with power up to 5W. To make these products easier to use for engineers and get them into production faster, TI has provided additional development tools. These tools include a TI Designs reference design, TIDA-00623, for designing a small 5W wireless power transmitter, and a design tool, bqStudio, which makes it easier for engineers to fine-tune and optimize the FOD in the system. As wireless charging technology becomes more popular and can support new features and power levels, it will be imperative for the company to provide development tools such as these to make it easier to integrate wireless charging technology in different applications.