By Dexter Johnson
With each passing day we are becoming more intertwined into the Internet of Things, where each and every object in the world—your clothes closet and every article of clothing in it, your dishwasher and every dish in it, and so on—has its own IP address. Obviously, they will communicate wirelessly. That takes power and, in many cases, frequent battery changes.
Now Peter Kinget, a professor or electrical engineering at Columbia University, and his colleagues have developed a nanoscale chip that requires so little energyin transmitting wireless signals that the batteries may never need to be replaced.
The chip will be presented at the at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) meeting in two weeks by Kinget’s Ph.D. student Baradwaj Vigraham under the user-friendly title “A Self-Duty-Cycled and Synchronized UWB Receiver SoC Consuming 375pJ/bit for -76.5dBm Sensitivity at 2Mbps.”
Batteries are not need if electrical power is transmitted wirelessly. Nanoscale chips are “activated” by radiated energy when walking by scanners.