The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) is a
multinational technology
Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...
consortium
A consortium () is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations, or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a ...
formed on December 17, 2008. WPC is a virtual corporation with administrative offices in Washington, DC. Its mission is to create and promote global adoption of its
interface standards:
Qi for small, mobile electronics, and Ki for wireless power in the kitchen. It is an open membership of Asian, European, and American companies, working toward the global standardization of wireless charging technology.
The Wireless Power Consortium was started by Fulton Innovation, a 100% subsidiary of
Alticor
Alticor is a privately owned American corporation run by the DeVos and Van Andel families. It was established in 1999 to serve as the parent company for a handful of business ventures, most notably the multi-level marketing company Amway and ...
, parent company of
Amway
Amway Corp. (short for "American Way") is an American multi-level marketing (MLM) company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada Township, Michi ...
. The original motivation was to power a portable water purifier, sold by
Amway
Amway Corp. (short for "American Way") is an American multi-level marketing (MLM) company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada Township, Michi ...
, called eSpring, for which the wireless power transfer technology called
eCoupled was created. On Nov 26, 2008 Fulton Innovation released "The Base Spec: Low Power Specification Guide for Partnered Product Development, Revision 0.9". Buoyed by the acquired intellectual property of a bankrupt University of Cambridge spin-out called
Splashpower, in an attempt to replicate the success story of the Wi-Fi Alliance formed in 1999, Fulton Innovation founded the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) in Dec 2008. In the process they partnered with seven others: ConvenientPower,
Logitech,
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...
,
Sanyo
is a former Japanese electronics manufacturer founded in 1947 by Toshio Iue, the brother-in-law of Kōnosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial, now known as Panasonic. Iue left Matsushita Electric to start his own bu ...
, Shenzhen Sang Fei Communications,
National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor Corporation was an United States of America, American Semiconductor manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturer, which specialized in analogue electronics, analog devices and subsystems, formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, ...
(now
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...
), and Texas Instruments. In Aug 2009 they published the now well-known Qi standard, version 0.95. A month later they released version 1.0. By then WPC already had 55+ members.
By 2012 Amway was looking for a buyer for its entire patent portfolio concerning wireless power transfer. This despite creating a lot of buzz at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with demos even for electric vehicle (EV) charging. Things clearly changed when in September 2012 it became clear that Nokia was releasing the Lumia 920 smartphone with built-in Qi charging.
Philips has by now acquired most of the Qi patent portfolio from Access Business Group. Royalties are therefore now being collected by Philips, but the key patent underlying the Qi standard
is still assigned to Access Business Group, a 100% subsidiary of
Alticor
Alticor is a privately owned American corporation run by the DeVos and Van Andel families. It was established in 1999 to serve as the parent company for a handful of business ventures, most notably the multi-level marketing company Amway and ...
, which also fully owns Amway.
Standards
*
Qi standard, for smartphones and other portable mobile devices. Qi Baseline Power Profile (BPP) delivers up to 5W and Qi Extended Power Profile (EPP) delivers up to 15W. A future extension will deliver up to 60W to enable laptop charging. However, even using the current EPP standard, it typically takes 2.5–5 hours to charge a typical smartphone, with a typical 10 Watt-hour battery, which would imply that if the charge rate was 10 Watts, it would take only one hour. Therefore 2.5 hours charge time means the average charging rate was only 10/2.5 = 4 watts. So the 15W was delivered only momentarily, until the battery gets hot. This reduction in charging rate is attributed to the battery protection circuitry which due to the heat generated by the receiver coil pressed against the battery, reduces the acceptable power dramatically.
* Cordless Kitchen standard, for kitchen appliances, for wirelessly delivering up to 2,200W. Under development since 2013, the Ki standard began launching certified products in 2025.
* Medium Power standard, a simple low-cost solution delivering 30-65W for power tools, robotic vacuum cleaners, e-bikes, and other battery-powered devices that do not require compatibility with the Qi standard for mobile phones charging. A future extension will deliver up to 200 W. However, the term ''medium power'' has so far meant only 15W (peak). This formed the basis of the v1.2, or the "15W", EPP standard announced as released, in February 2017. The sudden release announcement came just days after
Apple
An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
joined the Wireless Power Consortium, fueling rumors that the expected iPhone8 would feature Qi.
* Much earlier though, in 2014, WPC had announced it had incorporated a "resonant extension" to the
Qi standard. This announcement was repeated regularly subsequently, usually in conjunction with a University of Auckland spin-out called PowerbyProxi. "Resonant extension," supporting multiple phones on one transmitter over (z-separation) distances up to 45mm, was meant to be "v1.2" for several years, and it was thus implied it was almost fully ready, in repeated announcements by the Wireless Power Consortium over the years. In Feb 2015, the Chairman of WPC, Menno Treffers, clearly implied that the resonant extension was fully ready and the customers now had a choice: "These extensions provide WPC members and their customers with a seamless combination of inductive and resonant technologies...Customers can choose between inductive and resonant Qi chargers and be sure that the chargers work seamlessly with all Qi devices". In September 2015, the CEO of PowerbyProxi, Fady Mishriki, also announced in the form of a technical article in Planet Analog magazine, that the draft version of this "resonant extension" was almost fully complete. The article was titled "What's the Big Deal about Resonant?", and it stated that there was full backward compatibility, for both by the new receivers and transmitters, to the existing Qi standard. The new version, they announced, would support easy placement of multiple receivers, including previous Qi-certified BPP and EPP devices, on the same "intelligent" transmitter surface, delivering several-fold higher power, over far greater vertical distances (z-separations). This clearly resonated with
Apple
An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
, who purchased PowerbyProxi in October 2017 at an estimated price exceeding $100 million. That was meant to be the "resonant extension" to Qi, talked about since 2014, and to have been the now-canceled AirPower. AirPower is widely considered an "unprecedented embarrassment" for Apple.
History

The Wireless Power Consortium was established on 17 December 2008. It officially published the
Qi interface standard and the
low-power specification in August 2010. In October,
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...
joined the WPC.
Huawei
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...
and
Visteon became members of the WPC in November 2011. In May 2011, the consortium announced the
low-power specification in May 2011 at the
Auto Shanghai auto show
An auto show, also known as a motor show or car show, is a public exhibition of current automobile models, debuts, concept cars, or out-of-production classics. It is attended by automotive industry representatives, dealers, auto journalists a ...
and began to extend Qi to medium-power specifications.
The consortium announced through a
press release
A press release (also known as a media release) is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing new information, creating an official statement, or making an announcement directed for public releas ...
that Qi would soon be developed for tablets, computers and automobile in January 2012. Qi's specifications were again updated in April, with the distance upped to 40mm. In May 2014, the WPC announced that over 500 phones had Qi built-in. As of October 2016, the WPC, along with the AirFuel Alliance, is compliant with the use of the LinkCharge CT standard in commercial enterprises and businesses to use as a charging hotspot.
Technical debates
The underlying patent behind the Qi standard is US6436299B1.
On Page 16 the said patent mandates that both the receiver and transmitter be tuned to 100 kHz, for best results and maximum power transfer. This has been the underlying principle behind the Qi standard to date, and all proposed receivers needed to comply with that to receive approval by WPC. WPC implicitly assumes that the final result of this "double resonator" approach was a single resonant peak for the entire coupled system, also fixed at 100 kHz, irrespective of load or coupling. The entire control algorithm of Qi is based around this basic assumption. But that assumption was first contested by well-known author Sanjaya Maniktala in a seminar in 2014, and shortly thereafter by Stephen Terry from
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...
in 2015. Stephen Terry's presentation clearly states that the resonant frequency will shift to 140 kHz typically, at high loads, not remain fixed at 100 kHz as had been assumed by WPC. Stephen Terry's presentation disappeared from the WPC website from where it was originally downloaded. The problem with the resonant peak splitting and shifting as coupling increases, hitherto unknown or unrecognized by the Wireless Power Consortium, is also pointed out on the Wikipedia page of
Wireless power transfer
Wireless power transfer (WPT; also wireless energy transmission or WET) is the transmission of electrical energy without wires as a physical link. In a wireless power transmission system, an electric power source, electrically powered transmitte ...
with multiple citations: "A drawback of resonant coupling theory is that at close ranges when the two resonant circuits are tightly coupled, the resonant frequency of the system is no longer constant but "splits" into two resonant peaks, so the maximum power transfer no longer occurs at the original resonant frequency and the oscillator frequency must be tuned to the new resonance peak." This has reportedly contributed to the reported "alignment concerns" of Qi, and propelled the creation of a smart resonant peak tracking software by a California-based company called ChargEdge.
Members
As of 2025, the WPC had over 300 companies as its members with 9 of those companies represented in its
board of directors
A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency.
The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...
.
Board of Directors member companies
Membership
Membership towards the Wireless Power Consortium is open towards any entity, with two different types of membership with different fees and benefits. All types of membership add members to the organization's
directory, have available
OEM,
ODM and engineering/testing services, are available to exclusive stock supplies, are allowed free usage of the Qi and Ki logo and trademark, and may list certified products in WPC's Certified Product Database. Regular members can serve on and lead specification work groups for the ecosystems they belong to, have access to specification working drafts, have voting rights, can participate in plugfests and participate in WPC global quarterly meetings.
The fees and membership types are stated below:
See also
*
Open Dots Alliance
*
WiPower
*
Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP)
*
Power Matters Alliance (PMA)
References
{{reflist
External links
Official website
Organizations based in New Jersey
Organizations established in 2008
2008 establishments in New Jersey