 Okay, this week's new product introduction of the week is from TDK. This is brought to you by Digikey, thanks Digikey. What is the MPI of the week? Okay, this week's IMPI, I want to get the part number right so we're reading it off the Digikey bag. It's the TDK WCT 38466. It's a patterned coil for wireless power transmission, also known as Qi charging. This is a popular way to do wireless charging and you need to basically have a chip and antenna and the chips are easy to get, but the antennas have had improvements in design and that's what we're talking about this week because TDK has been making these antennas for a while. This is the WCT 38466. As you can tell it's got this loop, these loops of copper that form the antenna coil that one half of the inductive charging coil and it's nice and thin and very flat and funky. So it's basically like a custom designed. It comes all ready to go and I'll show it on the overhead at the end of this. It's really designed to work with anything with Qi charging and you just wire it up to the Qi management charger chip which is usually separate than the antenna and it does everything for you and you just slip this into the back of your design to add wireless charging. So the thing that's cool about this is it's super, super skinny. Traditionally these charger coils were super chunky, a couple millimeters thick. I think the previous version was like three millimeters. They're now under one millimeter. Oh amazing, so skinny, which means it's even easier than ever to add it into an existing or upcoming design. So what's really nice is that over the last few years, starting in about ten years ago, there were a lot of different wireless charging standards. I like Duracell had one, but the one that's kind of one out thankfully, there is a standard now is this Qi Qi charging standard which is what's used in almost like every phone these days. I believe even Apple phones use the standard and that's really good because it means that you have to have the charger matching with the charger base and traditionally if you wanted to use wireless charging in your device, you'd have to have the two coils. So let me go to the next page. We have two coils, you have a custom charger, and we sell these in the store. You have a transmitter, a custom receiver, and when they enter a line, the magnetic fields cross-couple and you get power transmission from one to the other. Basically, it's a transformer with an air core in the center and the air core is like the universe. But the problem is that they're not very smart. This has no control over what the voltage is going to be or how much current, whereas the Qi charging standard, there's some communication so it knows that it's the right kind of charger and it's not going to just turn on the power. If you happen to have a 12 volt output coil, it's not going to blast your electronics. So that's really nice and they of course come in five watts and I think 15 watts is the next generation. The problem is that if you wanted to add wireless charging, traditionally like on toothbrushes and other devices, you would have to produce, manufacture both the transmission and the receiving side using something like this. Whereas what's nice with having a standard is you can get off the shelf charging plates and then you put your device on the charging plate and you don't have to worry about that part. You can just worry about the device you're using. So this is what the original Qi charging antenna looked like. So there was three antennas and they were all like, they would work together so no matter how you arranged the board on the charging plate, it would work. And I think this is what TDK was talking about. This used to be like three millimeters thick. This massive coil and you see it's like protected with like a fabric so it doesn't, with vibration it doesn't short out, which of course would be bad and cause the wireless to stop working. So instead of this tri-core design, we now have a single pattern design, much, much thinner, much more flexible but actually at least as good or better patterning for where the device is on the plate sort of maintain charging because you're not, you want to have something like a toothbrush, it fits into a holder and the holder is like designed with a little nub and so it fits perfectly with a phone. So if you want to sort of slap it down on the charger, you want to make sure that it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned to still get a very good charge rate because that's the experience that users want to have. So now there's also a much more even efficiency, like there aren't any cold spots. Everything has kind of got this, you know, 80% plus efficiency, which is really great for wireless charging. And all you have to do is you have to match this with again a charging chip, which, you know, I just looked and I found like this one in particular. I'm not recommending this one in specific, but just this is what they look like. And this plugs into the rest of your power management circuitry, connects to the TX coil pads and then like it'll give you an interrupt and tell you like, hey, you know, data's coming in, sorry, power's coming in. That's how much power it can provide and you can use it to charge your internal battery. You know, it was interesting, you just got to watch that from like a Kickstarter and they don't even have a USB port on it anymore. It basically uses only, you know, Bluetooth though energy and then you charge it with wireless charging. So this is kind of the future because, you know, the moment you have a charging, you know, if you're using Bluetooth though energy for data, a USB port, all they do is like break or get dust in them or they can crack. It's a major failure point. Even with USB-C, which has, you know, 10,000 or whatever, insertion cycles, they can just break or they can get damaged and then the whole thing stops working whereas with this wireless charging capability, you know, there's less mechanical risk and you can have the whole thing be weatherproof or ruggedized. If you want like a matching transmission, of course, like I said, you can use an off-the-shelf charger. We also have this charging, you know, plate element that you can integrate. You see, just give a USB-C and it will automatically work with any Qi charging plate. So, you know, here's a demo of it charging some Android phone quite nicely. And... Available on Digi-Key. It's in stock. It is in stock. There's 187. Yes. And I wanted to show, we'll show a video, but I can also show it off. It's just interesting, especially you're getting your watch that doesn't even have a USB port really reminded me that this is kind of the future. Everything's going to have this integrated in. So, this is the pattern quarrel, so it's protected. It's weatherproof with this nice rubbery coating, but you can see the patterning. There's a mounting hole in the center to make sure it's centered. And then on the back is this adhesive that's protected. And then you just... This one comes with a little header, like a plain header, but of course you can remove the header sort of directly to your PCB and it's, you know, instant wireless charging with a standard that you can get off the shelf charging plates. All right. We're going to play the video, but I did want to mention something because someone said in one of the chats, did anyone see the Apple event today? Could they have, you know, AirPods and iPhones? They love wireless charging too. And watches. So, there is a big world out there and we can all watch these keynotes and all these things and we can figure out what we want to buy. But then some of us like to build stuff and, you know, the next thing that people will be wearing or doing 10 years from now, 5 years from now, 15 years from now is going to be thought up and worked on by someone who's doing electronics maybe early on in their career now or maybe it's something that they're going to work on later. So you get to see a little glimpse of the future every single week on MPI. It's the new products that are available and a lot of these things are what's going to be in everything later. So let's watch a video and that'll be this week's IonMPI.