If you follow my last post, you’ll see some of the pre-release announcements of the new Dell Latitude Z. On September 28th / 29th at Midnight (Central Time) the laptop was officially released, all the reviews hit the press and the ability to order one went live on Dell’s web site. A subset of the group I work with on a daily basis had gathered at a coworkers house to celebrate this event.
No, we don’t just get together to celebrate every new laptop that hits the market. The Latitude Z is the first commercially licensed product using eCoupled technology. This launch represents the culmination of years of work from everyone at Fulton Innovation as well as a handful of outside suppliers. Through our technology, Dell released a laptop that truly does not require a single cord for full functionality. They’ve paired our wireless power technology with Ultra Wide Band radios for data and packed it all into a laptop thinner than the Mac Air.
As I said, this was the the collective result of the work of many people over the course of more years than I have worked for Fulton. This is my account of things, of course, skipping out on engineering level details which would be inappropriate to broadcast to the world. Some of them will come out as soon as one of these is torn apart by your favorite tech web site, but the information shan’t come from me… as it so happens, I like what I do.
Shortly after I started working for Fulton, I found myself specializing in what we have classified as the medium power range. The intention was to have one set of hardware which could provide power to any device that took between 15 and 100 watts. The very first “laptop” prototype ended up being a bank of resistors designed simply to show how, and how quickly, the system would adapt to a changing load.
We showed our first real laptop being powered wireless at CES 2008, it was a Lenovo X60 (due to convenience, not contract) which ran at 50 watts. I had a major part in the development of that and the building of the system and was only at the last minute added to the CES travel list when it was noted that “If there are problems, he’s the only one who knows how to fix it.” The show went well, and while others had made claims of performing this feat, we were the only ones to do so successfully. It got its share of disbelieving looks and remarks from people.
Later that year, I had my first contact with the engineers at Dell. There had been business discussions with them long before I knew anything about eCoupled, but something changed internally, a fire got lit under someone’s ass, and for whatever reason they were now interested. This prompted my first trip to Austin, a one day adventure for a private showing of our prototype and some detailed discussions of the technology.
Next step: packaging. The message we got was something along the lines of “that’s impressive and all, and we’re interested, but this demo you have shown us is too big… you have to do your thing in X by Y by Z space.” That X, Y and Z… that represents less than half the space that our current prototypes required. A challenge had been issued and the pressure was on.
My life became centered around explore different coil geometries, sizes, wire selection, drive methodologies, anything that would help us fit into the constraints presented. Eventually we told the engineers we were working with what we had concluded to be the optimal solution for their needs and what the trade offs would be to use that solution. We then delivered a second prototype, this time using a Dell laptop, showcasing the latest developments. Trip 2 and maybe 3 to Austin for me.
The prototype did its thing and we passed to the next level. Now, we’re working with Dell’s suppliers to explain to them what the circuit is doing, what the critical elements are, how it needs to be designed to work. This supplier happened to be in Taiwan… so that’s where I went. Conveniently, Josh was the other person working on the project, so he was my guide form my first foray into international business travel. The discussions almost entirely centered around size. They were trying to eliminate as much circuitry as possible, we were trying to explain why certain parts were of a critical nature and could not be changed. The end result was the first set of Dell produced boards.
These justified a few more trips to Austin, as well as a lot of work at home in the lab. Circuit testing was the name of the game. Our original tried and true circuit had been clipped, bend and crammed into the available space. The result… questions: What caps can we use? What ones don’t work and why? Can we change these FETs to this other part? There were several iterations of hardware and many more bench top tests done to get these answers.
Through this all, I was learning important communications lessons. That which is obvious to me looking at a schematic, is not obvious to someone half way around the world trying to understand the same schematic. Each of these revisions revealed new concerns which needed resolving.
Sometime, about 8 months ago, the initial hardware prototypes hit. Now, not only did we have our wireless power components, but we had the first of the systems that they’d be expected to work with. This was or first look at integrating the two parts into one functional unit.
February of this year was my first trip to China to see a production run of the hardware and do on-the-spot debugging. There were a few glitches in the hardware that was built. Another lesson learned: If you’re going to travel half way around the globe and are expected to be the expert on a system and have all the answers when you get there, don’t count on having any diagnostics tools that you didn’t bring. I was in China for 10 days, but the environment was unfamiliar, the tools were not what I was used to and progress was slow.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-latitude-z?c=us&l=en&s=bsd
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138635/New_Dell_Latitude_Z_laptop_charges_wirelessly
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138635/New_Dell_Latitude_Z_laptop_charges_wirelessly
