Here’s a recent insightful interview with Charlotte Savage, HaiLa’s Founder and Chief Innovation Officer:
ELECTRONICS
A Savage approach to ambient IoT at Sensors Converge
By
Matt Hamblen Jun 12, 2025 10:00am
backscatter HaiLa Technologies Sustainability Wi-Fi
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Charlotte Savage, founder of HaiLa Technologies, will conduct a tech panel at Sensors Converge June 25 focused on low power for ambient powered sensors. Ultimate goal: reduce battery waste. (Grok with prompts)
Sustainability remains a strong focus of many electronics companies and HaiLa Technologies is no exception. Charlotte Savage launched the company with TandemLaunch and her team has demonstrated the commercial viability of ultra low power backscatter communications over Wi-Fi.
The technology has emboldened Savage as an advocate for sustainability. At Sensors Converge 2025, she will lead a tech session on Ambient and Intelligent IoT that asks the question: What is the best way to address the 78 million IoT batteries that are disposed in landfills every day?
Fierce Electronics caught up with Savage to get a preview of her session on June 25 at Sensors Converge 2025 in Santa Clara, CA.
Fierce: Your company has focused on a mission to remove batteries from landfills and to get there via low power comms for millions of IoT devices. I wonder: is the message you impart gaining much support? It feels like there’s maybe less political focus on environmental and sustainability issues at least in the US. What are your thoughts?
Savage: It’s important to understand that ultra-low power communications addresses challenges for IoT devices across
multiple dimensions.
HaiLa’s focus is to reduce the radio connectivity power so that either a single battery is used for the whole device life cycle or, alternatively, ambient power sources can be used to eliminate IoT batteries altogether. At the current projected rate of IoT battery disposal globally, this is equivalent to $134M per day in end-user savings. HaiLa’s technology also address another critical end-user pain point which is the operating expense to send people out for device battery replacement. Highly power-efficient connectivity is a fundamental enabler for pervasive ambient sensing and for sensing with localized AI/ML. We have strong support for our solution delivery from partners like MuRata Electronics, a global leader in wireless solutions, as well as other large semiconductor companies.
Fierce: Are there generalized ways to describe the techniques companies are using for ambient and intelligent IoT? Are any of them imitating Haila?
Savage: There are a couple of fundamental approaches to achieve ultra low-power data transmission, and each has benefits for certain applications. For event-driven applications at the sensor, actively transmitting from the sensor tag is required, but it has to be done in an extremely power efficient way compared to conventional data communications. For regularly polled sensing applications, a technique known as passive backscatter can be used where the signal is reflected rather than being generated at the sensor tag, making it extremely power efficient. As a global leader in low-power RF design, HaiLa relies on both approaches combined with low power semiconductor design techniques. While commercial UHF RFID technology has achieved battery free communication based on backscattering, it requires specific infrastructure and devices to enable it. HaiLa holds IP for adapting passive backscatter to existing wireless protocols like Wi-Fi, BLE, Zigbee, Cellular, LoraWan and others.
Fierce: What protocols apply? Are they in effect, or more in the discussion stage?
Savage: International standards organizations for wireless communications protocols have already started to define specifications for the support of ambient-powered devices. The IEEE 802.11 is focused on Wi-Fi, where HaiLa is a regular participant. There are on-going activities in the 3GPP for cellular IoT connectivity, and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) published a research note on ambient IoT.
Fierce: What are some examples of how ultra low power for IoT can enable ambient powered sensors?
Savage: For many applications, the power consumption of the sensor is very low, and it is the radio communications part of the sensor module that consumes the lion’s share of the battery life, and which requires a battery in the first place. HaiLa’s solution reduces the communications power to the point where it is feasible to consider other options
Fierce: You have shown a lemon powering a connection, but what is emerging now?
Savage:
HaiLa’s current silicon supports a Wi-Fi compatible system reference design consuming less than 60 µW, complete with an environmental sensor, and is powered by harvested indoor ambient light using a photovoltaic (PV) cell instead of a battery. HaiLa has also demonstrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) backscatter. We are working to showcase an RF-energy harvested power source with our current silicon as well.
Fierce: It’s not just Haila, right? What is the field of ambient looking like?
Savage:
There is a very strong global focus on supporting ubiquitous, ambient IoT across multiple standards. With HaiLa’s RF design expertise and IP portfolio, we are poised to be a key player in this growing ecosystem.
Fierce: When in years will we see the more practical applications in numbers?
Savage: Industry analysts forecast over 20 billion connected devices by the end of 2025, growing to over 40 billion by 2030. The 2024 Bluetooth SIG report projects that with a focus on ambient-powered devices, scalability for IoT is into the trillions of devices. This pervasive connectivity is only possible with power efficiency.
Fierce: On protocols, can you offer insights into which ones are optimal?
Savage: Each protocol addresses specific application requirements depending on the type of network topology required. The majority of IoT connectivity today is on Wi-Fi at 31%, with Bluetooth at 25%, and Cellular at 21%. Wi-Fi is the de-facto protocol for wireless local area networks, while Bluetooth reigns for personal area networks, and cellular for mobile & wide area network connectivity.
Fierce: Can you share more about your low power vision and applications?
Savage:
Not every bit of IoT data needs to be routed to a massive data center for processing. The industry is being very mindful about how we best leverage connectivity and power resources. Bringing AI to the edge will mitigate power requirements, reduce latency and increase privacy which is crucial to all industry verticals.
HaiLa believes that we can positively contribute to these trends. Supporting Ambient IoT and enabling low power edge AI with power efficient communications options across multiple wireless protocols is our ambition. Not every use case lends itself to a battery free setup today. The exciting part about low power is that is also means you can design devices that are significantly smaller than they are today because you need less power storage.
Just think of what this can enable: Wireless devices you place once and never require battery maintenance. In the commercial context, this results in huge savings, not because batteries are costly but because we are not required to organize and send someone out to replace that battery.
It will enable tiny, connected devices that free us from traditionally wired devices or more bulky industrial design requirements due to battery size.
It will help with battery life in devices that need more power than can be practically harvested by any combination of methods.
Power efficiency, by definition, is an improvement to what we normally do. We believe that the cost of being inefficient, or even accepting the status quo of efficiency, matters. We are driven by the promise that our technology can make a positive impact. Less power and less waste are fundamental objectives.
HaiLa Technologies founder Charlotte Savage will lead a technical session on Ambient and Intelligent IoT at Sensors Converge 2025 in Santa Clara, CA, at 2:25 p.m. PT June 25. To attend the event, register online and received a free Expo Hall pass by using the code HAMBLEN.
This story originally appeared on May 29.
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