Telink Semiconductor, Shanghai, China, has announced a joint reference design for an electronic shelf label (ESL), which can support 2-10 daily screen updates without ever requiring a battery change.
Together with Nowi B.V., Deft, a Netherlands based company specialized in energy harvesting power management, a new design has been made, which enables retailers to deploy cost-competitive ESL’s with a reduced carbon footprint and without having to worry about battery changes for the entire lifetime of the e-label system. The device is able to harvest sufficient power from the indoor light in supermarket’s to power itself indefinitely.
Haipeng Jin, COO at Telink Semiconductor, said “In an effort to reduce waste, lower customer total cost of ownership, and improve sustainability we have successfully integrated both, energy harvesting and connectivity, in a complete ESL solution through the combination of the Telink TLSR8258 chipset and Nowi’s NH2 energy harvesting power management chipset.”
“Despite the difficulties of the current environment, our team in Shanghai worked closely with Nowi engineers in Delft to quickly create a solution using Telink’s low power high performance TLSR8258 chipset. This solution is a complete integrated electronic shelf label system providing retail system providers a tremendous platform to lower operating costs for their customers by eliminating the costs involved with removing and replacing batteries during the operating lifetime of the system. We are excited about the performance of the solution and the great potential it entails, we also envision the solution to be easily extended to other energy constrained IoT usage scenarios such as sensors and low power controllers.”
Simon van der Jagt, CEO at Nowi, said “One of the principle ideas for Nowi is moving the promise of energy harvesting from an idea to a viable solution. This ESL project with Telink shows how next-gen energy harvesting can both create new value while reducing the level of electronic waste created with the deployment of these systems. We are proud that our NH2 design with its compact form factor, elimination of extra electronic components and high performance can enable this tremendous new offering.”