Brennan Coulter
Jul 10, 2012
Featured

Microchip powered by different sources

A novel system from MIT combines power harvested from light, heat, and vibrations for use with minute wireless monitoring devices. Because each energy capturing method generates different voltages, energy harvesting devices typically have to pick a single source to draw power from. Not so with the MIT circuit; it manages to efficiently combine the power of its three sources simultaneously. This trick is achieved by rapidly alternating main sources, so at any given instance only one is directly feeding into the chip while the two remaining sources feed into a capacitor. Further maximizing the chips’ usefulness is its innovative dual path architecture, which allows the chip to not only draw power from a storage device but also directly from its power sources. The teams’ work could prove very beneficial to those developing low-power microcontrollers and wireless transceivers that could be powered by such sources.