Stanford University engineers recently demonstrated the feasibility of a wirelessly powered implantable cardiac device.

If our phones were really so smart they’d just charge themselves, wouldn’t they?, leaving us to more important matters like watching cat videos.

Wireless charging – which enables you to charge a mobile device by just placing it on a special mat – is set to take off thanks to an industry standard enabling interoperability between different manufacturers’ charging mats and mobile devices. TI was one of the key driving forces behind that standard and now supplies the enabling technology in volume to phone makers.

Laying the groundwork for widespread wireless power has meant:

• Developing a completely new set of chargers and power supplies that govern how current passes efficiently from the pad to the wire coils now embedded in most phones.
• Working closely with coil manufacturers to drive the devices to a size and power level that’s optimal for mobile phones. That’s also led to a roadmap for enabling wireless charging of tablets and other higher-power-consumption devices.
• Creating battery-management devices that interact with the coil to maximize charging efficiency.
• Establishing robust communication between the pad and the device being charged so that your phone can ask for power and the pad cheerfully complies until the phone says, "OK, that’s enough.”
• Integrating all of that into a single, efficient, affordable chip, which is TI’s ultimate innovation here.

The charging mat not only eliminates the need to regularly plug phones into walls, by the way, but it also greatly reduces use of a phone’s power connector jack, which is a phone’s most common point of failure. Eradicating that problem should gladden manufacturers and users alike.