Nanoleak is a low-power BLE platform with a built-in energy harvester, designed by Smartcores. At deep sleep state, Its leakage current is around 50nA, which is almost cut off from the power supply. To build a true battery-less remote control, this great low-power feature eliminates the risk of shelf-time or full dark time over-discharging, which potentially can damage the supercapacitor permanently.

Based on nanoleak patent pending feature, the remote control shelf-life time or fully dark environment battery life is far longer than 12 months. Here is the simulation with 365-day leakage results.

The world’s lowest leakage current battery-free remote control-嘉兴致芯科技有限公司

Other than the extremely low leakage current, those working currents are also very low, here are the typical values.

The world’s lowest leakage current battery-free remote control-嘉兴致芯科技有限公司

Note 1: In default reference design, the IR average current is controlled by firmware, and the maxim peak driving current is up to 400mA+.  In case the end application targets a higher driving current, we can either increase it by firmware setting or add one more external amplifying transistor or MOS component. If the end application targets less than 15m IR distance, we can add one more current limiting resistor to lower down driving current.

Note 2: Without any energy harvested, a 15F super capacitor can support remote control working 30days continually.

Note 3: In case the end-user put the remote control under a fully dark environment long term, the firmware would control power consumption by entering nanoleak state automatically.

The BF530x nanoleak modules are all-in-one solutions, it made remote control designing easy, below is the reference schematic, we can see there are very few passive components and one analog microphone needed.

The world’s lowest leakage current battery-free remote control-嘉兴致芯科技有限公司