Imagine being able to power your smoke alarm in your house without ever needing to change your batteries. It would get it’s energy simply from the energy and vibrations from everything around it. That is the goal of Texas Instruments. They call it “energy scavenging”, and they say the reality is not that far away.
Employing the inventor of the original microchip Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments, currently the world’s third largest chip maker, is busy trying to break another electronic frontier. This time by creating a chip that uses an infinitesimally small amount of energy to operate. They actually did a demonstration showing a clock being run on...get this...grapes.
Low-powered processing engineer at TI, Adrian Valenzuela, told how the reason this experiment was so important was because it showed that it was possible to run things on low-powered or alternate energy sources. “We [Texas Instruments] have created systems that are so low-powered they can sample sensors and transmit information wireless without the need of a battery and they will last forever,” he said.
Imagine, all those people stomping around your office, they can actually run your coffee pot. Never having to hear “Do we have any more AA batteries for my camera?” again. Sweet.
Read [BBC News]
No comments:
Post a Comment