Standards organizations for wireless charging join forces

The Alliance for Wireless Power and the Power Matters Alliance have agreed to make their inductance and magnetic resonance standard for wireless charging compatible. The well-known standard Qi has thus acquired a single major competitor.

In the field of wireless charging, three standards organizations have so far competed for the market: the Wireless Power Consortium with the Qi standard, the PMA and the A4WP. The latter two will now support each other’s technology. The standards are based on other techniques. The A4WP technology uses magnetic resonance, which means that devices do not have to make direct contact for wireless charging and can simultaneously charge different devices with different energy needs.

PMA focuses on the development of induction, whereby the device to be charged must be placed in a specific place on the charging surface. Qi also uses induction and this standard has so far convinced most smartphone manufacturers. HTC, Samsung, LG and Nokia, among others, made devices with Qi support.

However, Samsung, HTC and LG have since joined the Power Matters Alliance, as have other big names including Blackberry, Texas Instruments, Google and Facebook. Starbucks and the wireless charging station provider Powerkiss also support PMA. A4WP is supported by Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm and Broadcom, among others.

In further development of the standard, PMA promises to implement A4WP’s Rezence specification for both transmitter and receiver and for both single and multiple configurations. In turn, A4WP offers manufacturers the option to add multimode inductance to implementations of the magnetic resonance standard.