Michael Kanellos

An Old Favorite—WiFi— Preps to Disrupt Smart Meter Market August 22, 2008 at 10:57 AM

Ah, Zigbee. It was looking so easy.

The low-power wireless networking standard has been making tremendous gains as a way to reduce energy consumption in homes and buildings. Several utilities have launched trials in which appliances, thermostats and other items are adjusted remotely via Zigbee to cut power.

It’s a great idea. It’s just the wrong networking standard, says Vijay Parmar, president and CEO of GainSpan. A spin-out from Intel, GainSpan has developed a low-power WiFi module that can be deployed pretty much in the same manner. One of GainSpan’s receivers can function for ten years on a single battery, he says.
Power consumption from GainSpan’s system is as low or lower than competing products based around Zigbee, he added.

The advantage, of course, is that WiFi is familiar and the infrastructure already exists. Most commercial buildings already have WiFi base stations and it’s a good bet that most homes with a laptop have WiFi too. Thus, you could plug a Gainspan-enabled WiFi module into a thermostat, give it a name on a network and start cutting your heating and air conditioning bill.

Equipment manufacturers like it too because it’s familiar. An Asian manufacturer told Parmar that they were making Zigbee equipment only because “that is what utilities want. Traditional WiFi companies are not doing this,” he said.

Zigbee companies, no doubt, differ, and can point out that many of the large trials underway now use Zigbee. It should be an interesting horse race.

The problem with WiFi historically has been excessive power consumption. GainSpan says they have solved that by, among other engineering tricks, integrating the processor onto the same chip with the radio. In laptops, the WiFi radio is largely controlled by the processor, another chip located (in chip terms) at a good distance away. GainSpan’s chips have a two ARM cores right there on the same part. The company has also tweaked the software and other elements to reduce power as well as came up with tools to make it easy to integrate the radio with sensors for measuring temperature, pressure, motion or some other environmental data.

While at Intel, Parmar was in charge of trying to find a low-power networking standard for sensors. His group examined Zigbee and others. “The question with WiFi is can you solve the battery life problem,” he said. GainSpan grew out of that. Rather than keep it within the corporate umbrella (Intel was shedding networking units at the time), Intel spun it out. GainSpan got $10.5 million in late 2006 and started sampling chips in June 2007.

Toward the end of last year it began to ship chips commercially. Customers include Aginova, which created a cold storage monitoring system.

CTO Lewis Adams listed off a bunch of other actual and potential applications. One customer, a dairy foods specialist, has hooked it up to the 1200 horsepower electric motors that turn a thick, hot yellow liquid into blocks of cheese. By monitoring the pressure and temperature of the liquid, the motors can be cranked down to 300 horsepower, greatly saving power.

In commercial buildings, there will likely be demand for this in lighting. Most commercial buildings don’t control lighting in any dymamic way. Connect GainSpan’s chip to a motion sensor and you could have light dimming for the light fixtures in stairwells and other areas. Right now, those lights just crank away even though people are only there for short periods of time during the day.

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