Logistics sensor tag capable of wide-range wireless power supply

Background

There is an increasing demand for sophisticated management of freight and cargo by introducing IoT technology, such as collecting information of location, temperature, humidity and many others. However, with the conventional logistic tags equipped with sensors and communication functions, a large amount of electricity is required to constantly monitor and log information from the time of shipment until reaching the final destination. Therefore, the primary (non-rechargeable) batteries used for conventional tags tends to become large in size. Furthermore, considerable amount of batteries are required to be replaced or discarded each time, which requires maintenance works and costs. Also it is not friendly to environment. This has been one of the bottleneck in the introduction of IoT for logistics.

Solutions

EnerCera battery enables wireless power supply (WPT: wireless power transfer) to be adopted for logistics tags, which realizes maintenance-free power supply. Since electricity is always supplied by radio waves, the battery can be miniaturized and there is no need to replace the battery. The 920MHz band WPT system developed by Panasonic features the power to be transmitted from one transmitter to a large number of distribution tags simultaneously over a long distance. It is possible to supply power to every corner of a dark warehouse or to the entire cargo inside the ocean container. The EnerCera battery is indispensable for the introduction of WPT, and contributes to the digital transformation (DX) of logistics.