System
developed at MIT could combine power harvested from light, heat and vibrations
to run monitoring systems.
(July 9, 2012) Researchers
at MIT have taken a significant step toward battery-free monitoring systems —
which could ultimately be used in biomedical devices, environmental sensors in
remote locations and gauges in hard-to-reach spots, among other applications.
“Energy harvesting is
becoming a reality,” says Chandrakasan, the Keithley Professor of Electrical
Engineering and head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. Low-power chips that can collect data and relay it to a central
facility are under development, as are systems to harness power from
environmental sources. But the new design achieves efficient use of multiple
power sources in a single device, a big advantage since many of these sources
are intermittent and unpredictable.
Previous work from the lab of MIT
professor Anantha Chandrakasan has focused on the development of computer and
wireless-communication chips that can operate at extremely low power levels,
and on a variety of devices that can harness power from natural light, heat and
vibrations in the environment.
The latest development, carried
out with doctoral student Saurav Bandyopadhyay, is a chip that could harness
all three of these ambient power sources at once, optimizing power delivery.
The energy-combining circuit is
described in a paper being published this summer in the IEEE Journal of
Solid-State Circuits.