Finances Loom Large As Obstacle to Unified Wireless Charging Standard

AUSTIN -- Differences among the three major wireless charging standards have narrowed somewhat over the past few months, with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) and the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) adding working groups to study magnetic resonance, a key element of the Alliance for Wireless Power’s (A4WP) standard. Just don’t expect the groups to announce unification anytime soon, said consortium heads who addressed the wireless charging standard battle on a panel at the International Wireless Power Summit.

The WPC and PMA wireless charging standards are based on magnetic induction and have specific requirements for positioning a receiver coil on a transmitter for wireless charging to occur. A4WP’s standard is based on magnetic resonance, which allows more “spatial freedom” when positioning a device, or multiple devices, on a charging surface. Multiple-coil solutions could be done, at some cost, but that won’t happen in the near term for reasons that go beyond technology, said panelists.

As of Nov. 30 the WPC had 188 members, PMA had 106 member companies and A4WP had 64, but there’s overlap among member companies hedging their bets on which standard will win out. WPC and PMA share 45 member companies, PMA and A4WP share 27 members and A4WP and WPC share 28 members, said LeRoy Johnson, panel moderator and conference director. Seventeen are in all three, he said.

Attendees agreed a standards battle is impeding the progress of a wireless charging infrastructure and broad product development, because companies don’t want to commit to a format with a short shelf life. A survey of the now-obsolete collection of iHome devices in hotels across the country is testament to that concern, because those radios with Apple 30-pin connectors for iPod docks can’t be used now to charge an iPhone 5. Apple wasn’t even part of the discussion at this conference, but it’s unlikely the primary parties with open standards will agree on a single solution in the near future because of the stakes involved.

On why a unified standard doesn’t exist, Menno Treffers, chairman of the WPC, which backs the Qi wireless charging standard, said, “In a winner-take-all game, sometimes being the winner is hugely profitable.” Treffers, whose day job is senior director-standardization at Philips IP&S, cited the VCR war of the 1970s among VHS, Betamax and the Video Compact Cassette. That standards war turned out to be “very profitable for Panasonic and less so for the others,” Treffers said. The perception in the industry that winning a standards battle can be very profitable “attracts companies and individuals that like to place large bets,” he said.

Likening standard creation to “the psychology of gambling,” Treffers said creating one is “easy and doesn’t take a huge amount of money,” but getting out is more complicated for the companies that have placed bets on a format. For a supporter that invested “10 million toward a standard” and “you find yourself behind, the temptation is very large to put in another million to stay in the game and still have this small chance on a very large amount of money,” he said. So getting out, he said, “is more complicated than getting in.” But, he conceded, a standards battle is not good for the industry “and we'll have to find a way to make [the battle] short.” He called three standards vying to be the one “very unusual,” and said “a couple of years from now there will be only one.”

PMA and A4WP presented more collaborative viewpoints on the panel. Ron Resnick, president of PMA, said the PMA spec started out as an inductive approach, but he immediately recognized a need for resonant technology when he joined the group earlier in the year. PMA will look at other technologies as well going forward, he said. PMA was approved by IEEE to form a wireless charging standards development organization, which has tighter restrictions on the standards process, and that includes having no marketing function, he said. The goal is not to make a wireless charging standard PMA-specific, Resnick said. “The door is open. We should try to figure out how to harmonize and accelerate time to money as opposed to having multiple standards” that delay the opportunities for all companies involved, he said. Anyone can join the IEEE group and incorporate their specs, he said. The perception of a standards battle is “slowing down decisionmaking” on wireless charging throughout the CE industry, Resnick said.

The A4WP, the newest of the standards groups formed by Samsung and Qualcomm in mid-2012, promotes its spec as one that is “quantitatively and qualitatively different” than the PMA and WPC specs available now, said Kamil Grajski, president of A4WP and vice president-engineering at Qualcomm. “The reason there are multiple standards is that technology evolves,” he said, underscoring A4WP’s mantra that its solution offers support for multiple devices, multiple power levels and “freedom of positioning.”

There are two levels to the process of consolidation, Grajski said. One route is at the consortium level, and the other, a “more likely” route that “members in common” will drive their own solutions. As organization members, companies have access to those specifications and “are free to build” a solution combining multiple specs, Grajski told us. “One path to consolidation is multi-modal and some argue that’s an interim phase you could go through,” he said. He acknowledged that cost burdens for building in three parallel systems on one chip would be burdensome for any device maker, likening that type of solution to the boom box with a cassette player, CD player and radio.

Power level is another issue separating the three specs. Cellphones are the first wireless charging solutions and low power. But opportunities exist all the way up to electric vehicles. PMA is operating at 5 watts now and in first-half 2014 expects to deliver a standard spec up to 15 watts, Resnick said. By year-end 2014, the target is 50 watts “to appeal to multiple service models,” he said. The WPC spec currently achieves 5 watts as well, Treffers said. The group is working on extended power levels to a medium-range solution at 15 watts and then to 90 watts, and for kitchen appliances, WPC is working on a 2.5 kW charging solution. Treffers didn’t disclose a timetable but said it would be announced “when we are ready.”

A4WP’s baseline system spec has output power of 10 watts and 16 watts in two classes for transmitters, which powers two receiving units at 3.5 watts and one at 6.5 watts, Grajski said. The model is for multiple smartphones simultaneous charging, said Grajski. When Intel joined A4WP, the group formed a working group to extend the use case coverage to a full range of mobile computing devices including tablets and laptops, Grajski said. He wouldn’t provide a timetable but said conformity, interoperability and certification tests would likely take place in 2014.

On when wireless charging will be ubiquitous, Resnick said all of the specs will scale in different ways. Initially the telecom infrastructure is driving the interest so it’s essential to generate interest there. Globally, “they're not signing up in droves yet,” he said, because many of them are waiting to see what Apple will do, and Apple is working on its own proprietary solution.

When we asked all three how any wireless charging standard could take hold with public venues, the hospitality market and airports without Apple’s support, none of the panelists wanted to address the question. Only Treffers volunteered an answer and said, “Can Apple stay off board?” Apple was granted a patent last week for its own wireless charging system and has not participated in the Wireless Power summits. Treffers said, “Apple’s been good at creating their own ecosystem.” In the mid-term, Treffers sees room for “two incompatible ecosystems if one of them is Apple’s.” Long-term, he envisions a convergence of ecosystems “because we're not just talking about charging iPhones or tablets,” he said, citing products in automotive where there’s pressure to have a single solution, cameras and “lots of products that Apple doesn’t make.” Long-term there will be significant pressure to come to a single compatible world for wireless charging at these power levels. He defined long-term as 10 years and mid-term as “somewhere in between."

On what will determine how the wireless charging standards battle is won, Grajski referred to smartphone usage in China where users are turning to Wi-Fi for lower cost usage and draining their batteries in the process. That is creating demand for a wireless charging solution, which Grajski said is creating an opportunity where “we're all sitting on top of a volcano or a whale spout.” With all the work being done from the three groups and outside of the groups, “Somebody’s going to come in with the right solution” for wireless charging, he said. The challenge, though, is “how do you make a Starbucks or McDonald’s or the hospitality industry make a value element of their brand to be this capability?”

WPC’s Qi-compatible products are currently on the market, and PMA-enabled products such as Powermat chargers have been out for awhile. Specifications, certification and authorized test labs are now in place for A4WP, Grajski said, and the consortium held a plugfest in October where 15 transmitting and receiving devices from seven member companies were tested and successfully transferred power, Grajski said. Time to market for A4WP-certified products is “months,” he said, with some product launches expected at CES.

International Wireless Summit Notebook

Attendees at the International Wireless Summit represented a swath of fields including semiconductor, furniture and industrial furnishings, automotive, CE, lighting and boating. The infrastructure possibilities for wireless charging spots run the gamut from counters at Starbucks and McDonald’s to corporate boardrooms to schools. One participant spoke about inductive wireless power replacing the traditional electrical outlet in next-gen adaptable spaces with movable walls. In the near term, as devices require more power to deliver apps and services, requirements to keep those devices powered will continue to increase. But it’s questionable what consumers want at this stage. Kannyn Macrae, director-product management and marketing for Built to Tylt, a maker of Qi transmitters, told us security is an issue for consumers when it comes to wireless charging. “People are not interested in leaving their phone in a public place,” Macrae said. That extends from coffee shops even to inside the home where only friends and family are around, he said. In focus groups, younger phone users said, “No way am I going to put my phone in the kitchen where my father or my mother can see it,” an unexpected finding, Macrae said. “We thought that would be the common place where they'd want to put one,” he said of a communal charging pad. Ryan Sanderson, analyst with IHS, said, “It sounds like a great use case charging in a Starbucks or at your office desk, but if you have to make a phone call or check email you can’t have the phone on a desk,” said. “And you can’t leave your phone there because it won’t be there when you get back,” he added. The No. 1 space people want to charge their phone is a bedside table, Sanderson said. Focus group participants told Built to Tylt, “Make it so I can have it next to my bed or on my office desk,” Macrae said.