The sensors use an extremely efficient power converter chip, meaning it can harvest most of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of very small solar cells. Previous ultralow-power converters that used the same approach had efficiencies of 40 or 50%. And where most of ultralow-power predecessors that use a solar cell either charge a battery or directly power a device, the new chip can do both.
Researcher Dina Reda El-Damak said: "We need to regulate the input to extract the maximum power, and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best. And we want to do it without compromising the performance, at very limited input power levels — 10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt — for the Internet of things."
Extremely low-power sensors for broad application under the guise of The Internet of Things need to be able to run for months without battery changes or extract energy from the environment.
