How Indoor Solar Cells Enable Innovative Product Design

Every product starts with its purpose.
A computer mouse should fit naturally in your hand. A remote should feel intuitive to use. A sensor should disappear into its surroundings. Yet many products still end up being designed around their power source rather than the user.

Somewhere inside an otherwise carefully engineered product sits a battery compartment or a power connection. The design adapts around it with added thickness, removable covers, or cable routing. For decades, these compromises have simply been accepted as part of product design.

But what if the power source is adapted to the product instead?

Light Energy Harvesting Changes the Status Quo

Indoor light energy harvesting is more than another way of powering electronics. It changes how engineers can think about energy from the very beginning of the design process. As low-power electronics continue to evolve, so do the technologies that power them.

Epishine's indoor solar cells are just 0.2 mm thin, lightweight, and fully flexible. Instead of requiring dedicated space inside a product, they can follow curved surfaces and integrate naturally into the industrial design. Whether used as the primary power source or alongside an existing rechargeable battery, they allow designers to think differently about how products are powered.

Rather than designing around the limitations of a battery compartment, designers can begin designing around the energy already available in the environment, enabling the use of less material or fewer components while making products easier for end users to use, own, and maintain.

From Product Feature to Energy Infrastructure

One self-powered device is an interesting product concept. Ten thousand self-powered sensors, asset trackers, or electronic shelf labels deployed across a warehouse, office, or retail store represent something much bigger. They create an energy system that requires no wiring, no scheduled battery replacements, and significantly less maintenance over the product's lifetime.

This is not a future vision. Products powered by indoor light are already being deployed in real applications. inVirtus' EosFlex Bluetooth beacon enables industrial asset tracking using Bluetooth® and Angle-of-Arrival positioning while operating entirely from harvested indoor light, eliminating disposable batteries and routine maintenance.

Google's latest TV remote, manufactured by Ohsung Electronics, an official Google reference remote supplier, integrates Epishine's bifacial indoor solar cells directly into the remote's surface. By harvesting light from both sides, it continuously recharges whether it's lying face up or face down. There is no battery drawer to open, no disposable batteries to replace, and fewer design compromises to make.

Google TV's G32 Remote Control. Epishine’s thin, flexible, bifacial solar cells make electronics lighter and enable the capture of light from both sides to maximize energy output.

For low-power electronics, indoor light becomes more than a power source. It enables greater design freedom, allowing products to be designed around the user instead of the power source. The result is products that are easier to use and own, require less maintenance, reduce total cost of ownership, and deliver a fundamentally different user experience.

Manufacturing Designed to Scale

Design freedom only matters if it can be manufactured at scale. A breakthrough product is not built from a single successful prototype, but from millions of identical products with consistent performance over many years. That is where manufacturing becomes just as important as innovation.

Built on more than 30 years of organic photovoltaics research, Epishine has spent over a decade transforming scientific breakthroughs into consistent industrial manufacturing. The indoor solar cells are produced continuously on a moving web, much like newspaper printing, allowing high-volume production with repeatable quality and efficient integration into customer manufacturing. This continuous manufacturing process is known as roll-to-roll manufacturing.

The Future of Product Design Starts with Available Energy

Perhaps the next generation of products won't be designed around power at all, but around the energy that's already there. Different applications will harvest different forms of ambient energy, whether that is light, motion, heat, or radio frequency energy.

If you're sketching the next revision of your product, we'd be happy to discuss how light energy harvesting could support your design goals.

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