The Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) have merged to provide a single wireless charging standard. The announcement was made during Intel’s keynote address at Computex 2015 earlier today, and reduces the number of wireless charging systems competing for a share of the market.
This alliance will see a new entity emerge from from the merger, but it is unknown what it will be called at this time. At the moment, the PMA currently supports the PowerMat power standard; while the A4WP works on the Rezence power standard. Intel itself is a member of A4WP, and has been working on adopting the Rezence standard for its own mobile devices.
Itself Rezence uses magnetic resonance to charge multiple devices at the same time with sufficient power, as well as charge devices through tables. Intel expects 5W Rezence solutions for wearables and smartphones to appear this year, with 10W appearing later. Intel itself is working on high power transfers for PCs and laptops; with the sixth generation Core processors leading the way. Ideally, this looks to be good for the peripheral market as keyboards and mice will be able to ditch traditional removable dry cells and instead draw power directly from a table.
Despite this merger, it does not look like the wireless charging industry is ready to make up its mind about which standard to support. Qi is still the more popular option, and remains as a competing standard. Intel’s support should be able to provide the push this new merged standard will need to get everyone to adopt it; although lack of support for Intel in the smartphone and tablet space may hamper efforts.
Still, it is good news to know that more technology companies are joining forces to provide new technology, instead of continually fragmenting the market.
At the same time, Intel announced new partnerships to deploy its Rezence wireless charging technology in multiple locations, not to mention the manufacture of devices that will use the technology. These include wireless charging furniture from Kokuyo and applicances from Haier.
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