Is Multi-year Battery Life for Wi-Fi IoT Devices Becoming a Reality? Estimate it Yourself!

Silicon Labs SiWx917 ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6 SoC offers truly IoT-optimized Wi-Fi connectivity and was recently validated by an independent test house to provide multi-year battery life on IoT devices. Energy efficiency is a key criteria for many of our customers, but Wi-Fi’s reputation for being power-intensive has made IoT device makers skeptical about using it. This is one of the reasons we’re thrilled to announce our new SiWx917 power estimator. This tool makes it possible to estimate how much battery life you can squeeze out of the SiWx917, the lowest power Wi-Fi 6 chip available.

The SiWx917 Changed What’s Possible With Wi-Fi 6 Battery Life

It’s no wonder consumers and companies are craving more Wi-Fi IoT devices. They don’t require separate gateways or hubs,. you can simply connect them to your Wi-Fi access point (AP) and voilà, they are on the cloud, and in your favorite ecosystem.

Historically, the short battery life and recharging interval of Wi-Fi devices turned off some buyers. Then came the Silicon Labs SiWx917 ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6 microcontroller, introducing energy-efficient Wi-Fi. Thanks to its extremely low connected sleep power consumption, multi-year battery life is now possible on Wi-Fi devices.

Despite its popularity in the market, we still hear doubts about whether multi-year battery life on Wi-Fi devices is realistic. To put an end to this debate, we SiWx917 Power Estimator, an online tool for estimating the battery life on your IoT device.

SiWx917 Tested to Deliver Multi-year Battery Life on Wi-Fi IoT Devices

The SiWx917, launched in 2023, was designed from the ground up for IoT-optimized Wi-Fi. It provides the lowest Wi-Fi 6 power consumption in its class for cloud-connected sleep mode, only 22µA. Its combined system power consumption for Wi-Fi 6 connected sleep and the application MCU in sleep is just 37µA. Its intelligent power management gives product developers more possibilities for optimizing Wi-Fi power for energy-efficient IoT applications. The ultra-low-power (ULP) peripherals allow sensor applications to operate while the rest of the chip is idle. The dedicated network wireless processor (NWP) independently manages wireless and networking operations, allowing the application MCU sleep. These, and many other power saving features on SiWx917 solve the battery life challenge for IoT device makers. As a matter of fact, Novus Labs, an independent testing provider, estimated that SiWx917 can enable smart locks to reach a 5-year battery life with four 3000mAh AA batteries.

However, achieving years of battery life on Wi-Fi IoT devices is not straightforward.

Can I Achieve Multi-year Battery Life on My Wi-Fi IoT Device?

We hear device makers asking this question frequently. The answer is yes, but Wi-Fi access points, physical environment, RF conditions, battery chemistry, application characteristics, and many, many other things. Most of these variables are beyond your control. They are derived by the environment where the device operates and the impact on your device’s battery life cannot be estimated in advance.

The SiWx917 Power Estimator allows you to estimate how your application characteristics will impact the battery life.

Estimating the Battery Life of Your Wi-Fi Device

The SiWx917 Power Estimator User Guide walks you through the application related variables affecting the battery life of your device, asking the relevant questions and facilitating your responses with multi-select drop down menus, default values, and value ranges. Here’s a snapshot of variables you are required to enter in the tool:

• Memory configuration and the amount of RAM to be retained in sleep
• Legacy power saving settings such as the delivery traffic indication message (DTIM)
• Wi-Fi 6 Target Wake Time (TWT) sleep configurations for unassociated and associated connectivity modes, wake up interval and duration, network scanning and Wi-Fi beacon listening frequency, TCP/IP keep-alive period, etc.
• In application processor configuration you can enable or disable the Cortex-M4 application microprocessor, and define its activity period and duration
• Data transfer configurations allow you to configure the optimal TCP keep-alive interval, frequence and duration of transmit and receive operations, etc.
• In the peripheral configuration section, you can simulate the power consumption effect of various peripherals such as humidity and temperature sensor and LCD display/li>

IoT-optimized Wi-Fi is about More than just Battery Life

We hope our new SiWx917 power estimator tool will help you to estimate how well your Wi-Fi device will score on one of the most critical IoT metrics, battery life.

However, IoT is about much more than just low power consumption and battery life. The SiWx917 was designed for IoT-optimized Wi-Fi connectivity, meeting the requirements of the future IoT, such as powerful compute, large memory, robust security, AI/ML acceleration, ecosystem support, and a broad set of peripherals. Learn about our IoT-optimized Wi-Fi solutions!