What opportunities for the future?
The Harvesting Revolution #4
As you may have seen, Dracula Technologies has just finalized a promising fundraising with two well-known industrialists to pre-industrialize LAYER®. So I thought it would be relevant to look at the different techniques for producing photovoltaic modules at the industrial scale.
💡 LEARNING CONTENT
Solution-Processing Techniques and industrialization of OPV devices (1st PART). In comparison with the existing photovoltaic technologies, organic photovoltaic (OPV)is known as a low-cost technology. This is allowed by the fact that organic solar cells (OSCs) could be solution-processed. The main advantage of solution-processing is that OCs could be fabricated at ambient pressure and ambient temperature, reducing manufacturing costs. In this first part, we go through the different technique used in laboratories. Read more…
Solution-Processing Techniques and industrialization of OPV devices (2nd PART). The second part highlights the different solution for the industrialization of the OPV modules. Read more…
🎙 INTERVIEW // Carloman Grelu - CTO @ Isra Cards
Hi Carloman, thanks for coming today. Hope you are doing well as the whole Isra Cards team.
Thank you. Fortunately for everyone in France and Europe, the COVID19 virus seems to be on the decline for the moment and we can almost start working as we used to. Whole ISRA team is doing well, and I hope this will remain as it is.
What are you doing from Isra Cards ? Could you present yourself and your function for Isra Cards ?
I am the current CTO of ISRA CARDS for almost the last 10 years after having served all my professional life in semiconductor industry, mainly in contactless and security fields. Joining ISRA CARDS was a thrilling opportunity which was given to me for helping the company to develop more and more complex electronic smartcards in our secure plant in France. My current role is then to select the relevant technologies and partners, assess the industrialization parameters and prerequisites and turn our innovations into real and fully operational products.
Which market are you targeting?
ISRA CARDS is a long-lasting company (45Y+), having a long history in different markets like retail, luxury, access control, identification of goods and people. Our strategy is to keep being very active in these segments by offering state of the art electronic smartcards and objects to our historical and new customers. Each segment presenting its inner challenges and digital mutations. If we take the example of retail, our customers now need to deep dive into “phygital” topics and applications to reinvent brick and mortar customer journey and face e-commerce competition. We intervene with them to support these new applications by offering breakthrough solutions based on NFC solutions for example.
Concerning the R&D department, which are the hottest subjects you have in the pipe?
This period is very active in R&D, and we work a lot on reinforcing our eco friendly portfolio of cards which was started in 2011 with ISBIO, our first cardboard-based product. Well before the rest of smartcard industry, we took a huge bet which was to give up on plastics for different applications. Success was massive, and we are now asked to add extra features (like RFID) and improve our product line for enhancing lifetime and keeping best of the class ecological footprint.
A second trend is the development of complex smartcards or smart objects which could include features like connectivity (RFID, NFC, BT, …), cryptography, lightning, and energy management.
I know, Isra Cards demonstrate a real interest for energy harvesting, why? and which kind of energy source did you already test?
Indeed, since we started to evaluate the possibility to manufacture more and more featured cards and objects, we spotted the energy issue as the biggest concern for 2 reasons:
First because including standards chemical batteries in our production flow is not an ease at all.
Second is due to eco-conception policy of the company: we imagine and design our products to be long lasting, autonomous, and recyclable if possible.
Embedding chemical batteries did not seem opportune and we focus our energy to find alternatives. We then leveraged our RF expertise to explore energy harvesting from the magnetic field.
Why did you decide to invest on OPV within Dracula Technologies?
First, I need to say I keep an eye on Dracula Technologies for a while and I am personally convinced that OPV is a true and solid alternative to power hundred of millions of devices. Getting energy for the RF field was a first step for us but not significant enough for different use cases so we decided to look for a second source of energy for our smart electronic devices in respect to very strict criteria:
Green energy: from manufacturing to usage and recycling.
Suitable for small footprint
Customizable
Thin and flexible
Once you have listed that: only OPV remains and LAYER© is the best in the class, so no more hesitation.
What are your aim concerning these developments?
Our goal is to demonstrate our capability to manufacture in Europe enhanced, secured, and autonomous electronic small IOT devices which can be easily deployed without any maintenance cost. We speak of plenty of applications like enhanced RFID (energy assisted), preventive maintenance, domestic surveillance, Smart Sensors trackers for luxury goods, remote medical monitoring device, … Integrating LAYER© in our products is a very important milestone to demonstrate that technology and environment protection can coexist.
Do you have some interesting webinars, article or other resources to share with our readers?
If we speak of generic purpose scientific content, I’m a regular reader of the conversation. This is a media which only publishes articles written by scientists and academics. So many things to learn there!
Another topic which is generally ignored when we speak of connected devices is security and this is real big mistake. End users and integrators should really consider security as a must to have to protect their data and prevent any intrusion. ISRA inherited of security concern by manufacturing highly secure smartcards and I would recommend anyone to read about security and risks. I like for example articles from Silicon TRUST.
📚 GREAT READS
- Our ‘zombie’ solar cells could power indoor devices without sunlight [Article]
Carloman introduced us to The Conversation website, here is an article that comes straight from this platform. According to Marina Freitag, from the Newcastle University, “the average UK household already uses an estimated average of 21 batteries a year. In total, this leads to an annual figure of 20,000-30,000 tons of general purpose battery waste”. Solar cells and broadly energy harvesting solutions could avoid this.
- The Future of Battery-Free Bluetooth Devices [Article]
Another article dealing with the problem of batteries and powering “35 billion connected IoT devices worldwide by 2023.” Srinivas Pattamatta is the VP Business of Business Development for Atmosic, a fabless semiconductor company, designing lowest power wireless solutions to dramatically reduce battery power
📅 (non-physical) EVENTS WHERE YOU SHOULD GO THIS MONTH
We are sharing some nice webinars and videos.
e-peas realised a webinar How to supply a LoRa Device With Energy Harvesting ? e-peas is designing ultra low-power semiconductors. Their solutions suit a wide range of wireless IoT applications: Home automation, smart buildings, smart cities, smart metering, wearables, e-health, people and assets indoor tracking, smart agriculture, etc.
From Dracula Technologies, during the quarantine we took the time to shoot a few videos to present quick and dirty and PoC realisation powered by LAYER®. With e-peas, we have developed an autonomous LoRA sensor that allows the reading of temperature, humidity and pressure data and the transmission of this information. This demonstrator is composed of an 8-band LAYER® module specifically designed and produced for this project.
👋 If you want to get in touch with me or someone of my team : contact@dracula-technologies.com
Take care !
Sadok
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