 Hi, I'm NPI. Hi NPI, brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. Thank you, DigiKey. This is when we look at all the cool new products that are being introduced. Oh, my DigiKey, this is Nixperia. Maybe it is Nixperia. Nixperia is a new name for the NXP family of chips. I think they kind of tweaked their name a little bit and also tweaked their logo, so cut me unawares. But this week's IMPI is the NEH-2000BY, available in a QFN16. And you can see that fancy new logo on the top of the chip render. This is an MPPT, a low cost, no inductor MPPT controller for solar panels to charge batteries for wearables or other small devices out in the field. It's an energy harvesting PMIC, but it really is designed best for photovoltaic, otherwise known as solar cells. So it's really cute about this chip is it's very inexpensive and it's very small, but it still has NX PowerPoint tracking for solar cells. You can use pretty much a three volt solar cell, so a good place to start. And it's used for charging batteries. You can run electronics off of it. It's just designed to be very small, very low cost, very simple to use. But with the power and efficiency of max PowerPoint tracking. So the sun, this is a photo from NASA, very cool solar flare image. You know what gets power from the sun? Superman and the NEH-2000BY. So you want to have a product that is powered by the sun or perhaps something that can charge you over USB, but you want to, you know, it's outside because it's agricultural to wearable or it's some sort of environmental monitor. It already has sunlight access. And so adding a low cost solar cell, I mean, solar cells are very cheap. They're on the order of like, you know, pennies or a couple dozens of cents. And you add this chip, it's about a dollar. And for you know it, you can extend the battery life by trickle charging a battery in between bigger scale charges or maybe if you are efficient enough, you can run your entire project off of the sun. So the issue with solar cells, I've used this image, it's a great picture from Wikipedia, is that solar cells have, you know, this is, each cell has about 0.5 volts of open circuit voltage. That's like where all the colorful lines drop off 0.5. And depending on how bright it is, the amount of current you can draw until you hit that cliff varies. So this is, you know, a one cell that can provide up to, you know, 40 milliamps max to this 0.04 amps max. That's the red line. But once you hit that 0.4 voltage, and you see kind of ranges at the lower current outputs like dimmer send, you get maybe 0.35 volts before the cliff. And then as it gets brighter, get closer to maybe 4.45 volts before you hit the cliff. But that, trying to find the maximum point, that point right before the voltage collapses and trying to keep your charger operating at that rate is very difficult because things that plug into the wall usually don't, you know, you will hit a certain limit but you'll get a much more gradual voltage drop. And so it's a lot easier to stay within the functioning range but also at light changes throughout the day that voltage point will vary as well. So you have to constantly be adjusting. So it's from the video. And they're showing like, you know, the traditional solution is you just set a fixed voltage and say, okay, 0.3 volts. That's what I'm assuming when you get it from the sunlight. But you don't get the maximum amount of power. If you want to get another 10, 20% or more, you really need a max power point solution. So that's what this does. And it's very simple. VIN is just connected to your solar cell. You get the MPT controller and then you just connect the battery output. You have a couple GPIO. VREF is for the charge booster, which I'll discuss in a moment. Disable turns it off, which is very useful if you're doing over voltage or over current protection, you want to quickly turn it off. And CISRAE just lets you know whether there's enough power to run whatever device you want to have trickle charged off of the NEH 2000 BY. This is the typical application. So you'll notice we've covered other MPT chargers and a lot of them use inductors for buck or boost conversion. This one doesn't. They don't really mention what is inside of it, but they sort of mentioned it's like a doubler. So it's probably a charge cap, a switch cap converter. So the input voltage from the cell is doubled and then regulated out to V-BAT. Sorry, not regulated out to V-BAT. So you may have to do some regulation on V-BAT if you have to keep it under a certain voltage. There's a bit of math in the datasheet that I won't go through, but basically you want to make sure because it's even though it's boosting two times, it's still a linear converter in a sense. So you want to make sure that you have enough solar cells in series to be high enough to have a little bit of voltage drop over the battery voltage, right? Because if you are say charging up a Li-Poly battery, it is usually about 3.7 volts, but it'll go up to 4.2. That means you need to have 4.5 volts on the V-BAT output so you can have a little headroom maybe for a voltage regulator or a charge controller, reduce the doubler, reduce the inefficiencies, et cetera. Basically your VOC of your solar cell should be about 0.7 times the maximum V-BAT. So it turns out if your V-BAT is 4.2 volts, your VOC is going to be 3 volts, which is a very common low cost solar cell. It's about 6 cells in a row. But the trade-off is that there's no protection on the output. It will charge the battery and the V-BAT will sink a little bit as it's charging, but eventually your battery will be full. You want to make sure that that V-BAT doesn't keep going, it doesn't try to charge the battery past 4.2 volts into 4.5 volts. In which case, again, you might want to either use some sort of regulator or charge controller or you can use a low cost overvoltage protector when the VDD, the V-BAT hits 4.2 volts or whatever. It turns off the disable pin and it shuts off and that will turn back on once the V-BAT drops below 4.2 or 4.1 or whatever. So you'll have some hysteresis. You'll keep your battery charged, but it won't overcharge it. OVP charge controller, it's up to you. You probably have a charge controller already in your design. You might feed this through a diode into your charge controller and they can share the charging state and protection with the USB charging you've got. It's in stock, lots of them. And you'll note, you know, basically the trade-off of having an inductive design is it's a lot smaller, less noisy and less prone to vibration issues because you don't have to worry about the inductor breaking. It's also a lot cheaper, easier to manufacture because it's a QFN. All right, we'll get a video and then on the other side, we'll do some new products. That's an opiate this week. Energy harvesting allows ambient energy generated by light or movement to be captured so it can be used to power devices. An Xperia energy harvesting takes this a step further by using a unique, ultra-fast maximum power point tracking or MPPT to maximize power extraction under changing conditions. What makes energy harvesting difficult is that we do not control the power source. As such, the power input is frequently changing. Imagine a solar-powered smartwatch on your wrist. If you move your hand, the light exposure to the solar panel changes. In order to collect as much energy as possible, the power management IC or PMIC, designed for low-power devices, needs to continuously adapt to these changes. In traditional power management, the peak efficiency is the most important aspect. With energy harvesting, the average efficiency throughout the day is key. This is determined by how well the chip can adapt to its changing environment. Traditional solutions are unable to adapt to a changing environment. The advantage of Nexperia's MPPT is that our energy harvesting PMIC measures its own power outputs. Every second, it checks all possible options, instantly finding the best setting that will maximize the amount of power collected. When more energy is collected, this means fewer batteries will be needed for low-power IoT, making Nexperia energy harvesting an environmentally-friendly solution that can contribute to a sustainable future for electronics. Nexperia Efficiency wins. Nexperia