TDK Acoustic Data Link Powering and Connecting Through Solid Matter

CES is a great place to see what technologies are still around the corner and have not made it yet to production

This TDK Acoustic Data Link is one of the more interesting technologies that can be applied to industrial products first and might make its way into consumers’ lives someday. Initially shown in 2021, it has been refined over the years, and TDK had a cool demo of the latest version in its CES 2025 booth. The endgame of this technology is this: transmit power and data through solid matter wirelessly.

The system works with two Piezoelectric ADL links, which are transducers, meaning that they transform one form of energy into another. In this case, the Piezoelectric Transducer converts electric energy into mechanical force. It is similar to a vibration generator in layman’s terms.

As you can see in the photo below, the two ADL links are facing each other, with the link on the other side transforming the vibration into power again. As you can imagine, TDK is also able to transport data at the same time by using specific frequency modulations that can carry the data without loss.

Official TDK photo

Factors such as the thickness of the separation and the material’s properties will affect how much can be transported from one side to the other. The system prefers rigid and thin materials such as stainless steel but is not limited to this. The demo we looked at actually showed a relatively thick metal casing.

The apparatus is for educational purposes, and the sealed container has several electronic boards inside to provide minimal functionality. To show that data can be transmitted, we sent “Hubert” (my first name), and you can see that some power is also going through.

You might ask how much power and data can be transmitted. Power-wise, it’s about 30mw. In consumer electronics, this is enough power to run some Bluetooth, RFID, NFC, IoT, or health monitoring devices. TDK points out that this is compatible with both RFID and NFC, two hugely popular protocols.

Data can go up to about 10 Kbit/s. At this speed, it would take about one second to send a 140-character text message. That’s modest but very much sufficient for a whole host of applications, such as Sensor communications, Command and Control of systems, Point of sale for small transactions, and Small file transfers. For example, telemetry packets are about 100 bytes and take only 0.08 seconds to transmit.

One of the most obvious ways to use this technology is to monitor completely sealed systems with sensors or systems. An example could be a (possibly high-pressure) tank that contains certain gases or liquids that people need to monitor.

Classic monitoring systems often don’t work in situations like these because wired data needs an orifice that may create leaks, and wireless data won’t be able to leave the tank. At the same time, how do you keep the internal system powered, perhaps for years?

TDK has identified potential customer pain points that its technology could efficiently solve

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