R & D departments of technology companies are constantly producing ideas, and the most interesting ones, those in which a company sees that it could take advantage of others, end up in patents. Making sure that the competition will not reach the same place in the same way is essential to try to get several extra centimeters when crossing the finish line.
That does not mean that each patent ends up in a finished product, but it reflects where the research of one and the other is progressing. The latest patent presented by Sony is quite relevant, as it talks about how to emit energy from one smartphone to succeed in loading another. Charge wirelessly from the phone itself, not from the charger, and for this you want to use the NFC chip.
Another use for the NFC
NFC technology is anything but new. We have to go back to 2003 to find the time when its standard was defined , although it was a long time until it was found in the market. It cannot be said to have been a success, but its use continues to resist the passage of time and although it is not a star characteristic, yes there are several manufacturers that remain faithful to it.
Until now it had only been used as a short distance device pairing, sending just the right from one phone to another to be able to establish a Bluetooth connection or one with WiFi Direct, but it seems that in Sony have given with another alternative use. Taking advantage of being able to broadcast information wirelessly, Sony wants to use it now to emit power.
Hence the new Sony patent that describes, so far on paper, how an NFC chip would be able to emit energy, not just data, from an accumulator, the battery of our smartphone, to be picked up in turn by Another NFC chip that places it in its corresponding accumulator. In short, you can charge a phone with another wirelessly.
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Finally, we would try to take a step beyond the use that can already be given to USB C with specification 3.1, although the latter corresponds specifically to the type of connection and not to the form of this (that is type C). If with a USB Power Delivery, C or not, we can use a terminal to load another, the system patented by Sony could do the same without cable. Long live the wireless.
A problem to solve, the energy lost
The new system patented by Sony establishes a method by which a device would have two antennas NFC, chips, that would be used to transfer energy and data between any two devices. Here they would enter from smartphones to televisions, personal computers and even refrigerators.
While the Qi wireless charging system creates a magnetic field so that another nearby device can pick it up and use it for charging, the new NFC wireless charging system would have the same problem. As it is not a directed connection like the one we get with the USB cable, whether normal from the charger or USB 3.1 from another device, you would lose a lot of energy down the road.
This is not a problem when we talk about a charger connected to the current and releasing a series of watts continuously, because the current coming from the wall is eternal. But if we are going to use one device with a finite battery to charge another, economizing is fundamental if we want the energy to be transmitted from one device to another and not be lost through the air.
All in all, the new Sony system seems quite interesting and we are confident that it will be able to bring it to reality. Whether through smartphones, or developing external batteries capable of wirelessly charging our mobile phones, any breakthrough in non-contact charges will benefit the market.
