Powercast Corporation walked away with the Best New Product 2025 at RFID Journal LIVE! last month for its RFID-powered, wire-and-battery-free sensor condition monitoring system customized for data centers.
Powercast collaborated with Asset Vue to customize its RFID sensing technology— known for maintenance-free monitoring because it can power itself perpetually from RAIN RFID inventory readers instead of wires and batteries— to monitor the temperature and humidity of mission-critical equipment stored on metal server racks without adding to the complexity of a data center.
The company has been at the forefront of innovation for over two decades and Powercast’s CTO Dr. Charles Greene recently sat down with RFIDJournal.com to share insights on their groundbreaking work in wireless power, RFID advancements, the sustainability-focused solutions that are fueling their rapid growth and emerging trends like Digital Product Passport compliance that Powercast aims to leverage its unique technologies to meet these evolving global demands.
RFIDJournal.com: Dr. Greene, thanks for taking time to talk with us. Can you give us the history on Powercast?
Dr. Charles Greene: Thanks for having me. Powercast has been in business since 2003, founded on technology we licensed out of the University of Pittsburgh. We’ve primarily focused on RF based wireless power transfer using radio waves to send power over distance. What differentiates us a little bit from RFID is the fact that our RF to DC converter is very efficient and allows us to do things beyond identification, such as battery recharging.
RFIDJournal.com: What are some of the markets that you are active in?
Dr. Greene: One of our main focuses is consumer electronics such as mobile and computer peripherals; think low power devices like keyboards, mice, game controllers, and TV remotes. We do a lot of sensor devices as well. We’ve gone as far as 120 feet with one of our transmitters powering a Bluetooth temperature sensor and beaconing every minute. So, there are all kinds of different markets for our technology.
RFIDJournal.com: And what about the RFID market?
Dr. Greene: We want to take RFID beyond identification, adding in things like sensors for temperature, humidity, light level— all kinds of different sensor applications. We’ve done electronic shelf labels with RFID, where we power the display and use RFID as a communication channel. We were able to write the pricing data into the screen and update it so those devices don’t need to have batteries.
RFIDJournal.com: Why would this be attractive to retailers?
Dr. Greene: If you are a big retailer, we are solving two of your problems: maintenance of batteries and sustainability. With e-waste, you could be throwing away billions of batteries every few years because you must change them all the time— it’s just crazy to think about it. More and more of our customers are worrying about sustainability, specifically batteries going into the landfill and the contamination affecting the groundwater
If you just go into a store and look around at all the product labels, a lot are RFID. We’ve been doing RFID for over 10 years now and worked with a customer, Asset View, to develop this tag for data center applications. One of the key challenges with our existing tag was the form factor, how it could be mounted, would it block the airflow in the server racks. They asked us to redesign it to be more tailored towards data center applications as they are already tracking equipment in these data centers.
So the RFID infrastructure is already there. We have the ability to basically upsell the customer and say, “hey, I’m tracking all your stuff, but now I could give you information on your server racks as well— are they running too hot or are you overcooling and using too much energy? What is the humidity?”
We’re looking at other sensors we can add, like airflow, to determine if you have a fan that’s stuck or blocked inside of data centers, all using RFID. It’s completely maintenance free for the data center operators and it’s no additional infrastructure to put in other than the tags themselves because the readers are already there. The maintenance free part is definitely a key selling point
RFIDJournal.com: Can you tell us about Powercast’s wire-and-battery-free RFID sensor tags that won the Best New Product award RFID Journal LIVE! this year?
Dr. Greene: We’ve been doing this a long time and the technology’s really interesting as it can enable a lot of new applications. We always like to come up with new ideas, present new products at the show. We did get a lot of traction from the show, with a lot of interest in the tag itself. RFID is kind of a subset of what we can do, but it is a very interesting market for us because the volumes typically are really, really high. You’re getting valuable information.
We’re pretty excited to move forward with Asset View and get more case study data to then present into the RFID world as “hey, this is how it worked in this particular application as you can see.”
RFIDJournal.com: What are some of the other new offerings you are excited about?
Dr. Greene: We’ve recently added inductive transfer to our portfolio. We licensed this from Powermat, the company that provides the technology to your smartphone to do wireless charging. We are licensing from them to build our own modules to sell, looking at things beyond cell phones. Typically, we’re looking anywhere from 40 watts all the way up to a kilowatt of power transfer, focused on things like pumps in fish tanks as well as high-power robotic solutions.
Pittsburgh, where we are headquartered, is a very big robotic town. The robots you see roaming around stores now, they must go back and dock to recharge. We talked to a lot of robotic companies and the big problem is they think they’re docked but it’s not a good electrical connection.
When you start charging at these high-power rates, they melt the connectors. There’s a bunch of maintenance headaches with having to go out and replace those connectors. So the idea of just driving the robot over a pad and recharging it at a kilowatt is a very attractive solution because you can be misaligned and still not have any issues.
To that end, we had partnered with ETI, which is focused on magnetic resonance which lies in between RF and inductive. Instead of having a coil, you have a loop. For example, think of your desk where you have a loop that goes around the outside connected to a generator, creating a 6.78 megahertz current through that loop. The loop generates a magnetic field and then you can place devices inside that loop. The devices have a receiving loop and a receiver that directly power them at up to 100 watts. At CES, we had a Bluetooth speaker, a desk lamp, a computer monitor and a laptop all from a 100 Watt loop on a desk.
This is allowing us to go from an RF wireless power company to a wireless power company. It doesn’t matter what technology you need, we have all three in our portfolio and we’re helping companies take those technologies and productize it.
RFIDJournal.com: Powercast has produced about 25,000,000 chips in the last three years into various markets. But your capabilities go beyond that. What else do you offer?
Dr. Greene: We make end products for companies and that’s something that not a lot of people know that we do—mechanical design, firmware, product packaging and branding.
We’ve made about 8 to 10 million end products over the last three years for our customers who typically don’t necessarily know how to make the product. They know what they want, but they don’t know how to make it. Where we know how to manufacture stuff in high volume.
We have the staff here to make those products and we’ve taken that and kind of elevated our business to get into end products as well. We have manufacturing location in the U.S., China, and two locations in Vietnam. We can make end products to complement our chips and typically those products have our chips inside as well. We can do all the engineering work for the customer.
RFIDJournal.com: Where do you see your growth for your company going forward?
Dr. Greene: I see the RF technology continuing to rapidly grow and I want to expand our company more into RFID as our technologies are very analogous. We were in Italy last year for the RAIN conference, trying to really get people interested in RFID in consumer products. All anyone ever thinks about with RFID is retail and logistics, right? We’re looking at RFID in the consumer electronics area. When consumers buy a product at a retail store and take it home, companies and consumers can leverage the RFID information from those products at home.
RFIDJournal.com: I assume while you were in Europe, the Digital Project Passport (DPP) was an issue that was raised.
Dr. Greene: Yes, this was one of the big things that we talked about in Florence was how can we get RAIN positioned as a solution for DPP.
While QR codes are cheap—you scan them, you go to a website, it tells you what it is, model number, recycling, all that stuff the consumer needs to know. Well, that’s great. But most products when you use them over and over, that QR code is going to get worn and damaged. Some are looking at NFC as a solution as well. But where is it in the product? You are going to have to get right over top of it—imagine trying to get the information from a washing machine, searching around for the NFC tag.
In Florence, we started talking about clothing and shoes. People were like, ‘why would you want to know the model number of your jeans?’ I said, because I want to reorder the same jeans, I want the same product that I’m nice and comfortable in. But, you know, after you wash your clothes for 10 or 20 times, you can’t read the tag anymore.
Looking at it from our perspective, we can use RAIN RFID as a DPP through integration into keyboards, mice and other things. But with our technology bolted on to RAIN, we can power the devices from Powercast readers. I think that’s where we’re going to see expansion.
When we look at how we can enable powering and charging with RAIN RFID products, that’s what I’ve been focused on about the last two years, moving us into that area because DPP is going to be big obviously. If it’s done in Europe, it’s only a matter of time before there is a bigger adoption.
RFIDJournal.com: Where do you see growth in the RFID market?
Dr. Greene: You have retail, especially with Walmart tagging everything, DPP and even the FDA’s FSMA regulations on food tracking. Obviously, sensors are very important there for food safety and just quality of food in general.
In the food market, we can bring our technology in to power these sensors and use RFID to track foods that are sensitive to temperature and humidity, making sure the temperature humidity inside the packaging and shipping containers maintains a certain range, so it doesn’t mold or spoiled.
RFIDJournal.com: What are Powercast biggest attributes for companies that want to work with you?
Dr. Greene: We have an extremely good team here, especially when it comes to product design, quality, paying attention to the details. I think that’s what really sets us apart from a lot of the competitors is we tend to do things better and we do them well— that’s kind of been the mantra here. We want our products to be top quality, and we want to have good relationships with our customers to make sure that we’re supporting them the way they need to be supported.
We want to continue to expand our business into new markets, things like keyboards and mice and other types of those mobile and computer peripherals. And at the same time grow our market share in the smart inductive area where we’re recharging kiosks, mobile computer devices, robotic solutions and now into the magnetic resonance space.