Leading industry companies including Infineon, Intel, PepsiCo, and Qualcomm have joined together to form the Ambient IoT Alliance (AIoTA) to develop and scale energy-harvesting in battery-less IoT sensor devices. The group is focused on ambient IoT – as written about as a conceot in these pages for years – in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G devices, specifically. The other founders are Atmosic, VusionGroup, and Wiliot.
There is ongoing work to include ambient IoT as a 3GPP work item in development of the 5G standard in releases 19 and 20 (5G Advanced). The IEEE (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth SIG have their own work items, alongside. Similar work is being done by the LoRaWAN and Sigfox communities. The alliance said it wants an “open, harmonised, and aligned multi-standard ecosystem”. It wants other companies that produce or utilise IoT tags, devices, networking middleware, applications, and cloud services to join.
It has appealed to “businesses, telcos, technology vendors, and standards bodies” to help with “best practices, interoperability, and other alliance efforts”. A statement said: “More and more everyday battery-less things will be interconnected and integrated into the world around us.” It suggested “large-scale deployment(s)” in “supply chains, retail channels, and healthcare delivery services”, with “profound benefits for society”.
Alliance is focused on ambient IoT standards for “battery-free, low-cost technologies” to connect products and assets – “which can also improve AI services in the cloud”. The statement leaned into the AI angle, saying: “Ambient IoT and AI are symbiotic technologies… [Their] simultaneous rise will give businesses and consumers unprecedented understanding of the world around them… The business benefits are massive. Ambient IoT represents the next great data platform for leveraging AI and realising the tremendous ROI promised by AI solutions.”
The point, presumably, is that IoT will get properly ‘massive’ if the battery is removed. “As ambient IoT becomes accepted and pervades all industries, the insight derived from advanced analytics will continue to change how businesses operate. In the meantime, for ambient IoT to reach its full potential and transform the world, it takes an alliance of companies with products and technologies that work together,” said the statement.
Kamesh Medapalli, a senior vice president at Infineon Technologies, said: “Ambient IoT is well aligned with Infineon’s strategic focus on IoT and Energy leadership and our motto of driving digitalization and decarbonization. We are proud to shape new industry standards like ambient IoT to foster innovation to connect billions of cost-optimized IoT devices securely, while helping to save our precious planet.”
Alon Yehezkely, chief technology officer at Wiliot, said: “As pioneers of ambient IoT solutions, it has been gratifying to work with other companies that share a common vision. Members of the Ambient IoT Alliance believe in the transformative potential of ambient IoT, bringing their unique perspective and technology expertise.”
David Su, co-founder at Atmosic, said: “Ambient IoT is the key to sustainable IoT adoption. It allows us to rearchitect wireless tracking solutions to either use very little power or harvested energy, so everything can remain connected continuously and companies can operate at maximum efficiency.”
