Power consumption is a crucial factor for the Internet of Things  (IoT) applications, as it relies on a battery, which has a limited capacity and short service life, to carry out the device’s operations. IoT devices are often deployed in places that are physically difficult to reach making it difficult and expensive to replace them when they discharge. This is one of the major challenges faced in the IoT market. One engineering solution that is gaining popularity is to leverage energy harvesting technologies and supercapacitors, which are also known as ultracapacitors or electric double-layer capacitors (EDLC).
Capacitech’s physically flexible and high-power energy storage product, the Cable-Based Capacitor, is a supercapacitor that can be paired with energy harvesting technologies to offer IoT hardware developers and manufacturers an alternative to these problematic batteries and their short service life. Utilizing this flexible capacitor technology will make these IoT devices energy independent, free from batteries, and smaller than they would be using traditional capacitor technologies.
In order to replace batteries in IoT applications, a supercapacitor must be paired with a power management integrated circuit (PMIC) and also an energy harvester such as an indoor solar cell. Traditional supercapacitors take up significant space on the circuit board, which limits a designers’ ability to offer certain features or smaller product sizes. Capacitech’s Cable-Based Capacitor possesses a unique, wire-shaped, and physically flexible form factor that can be integrated into the energy harvesters’ wiring infrastructure to alleviate this engineering tradeoff.
