Abstract
Untethered, wirelessly interconnected devices are becoming pervasive in today’s society forming the Internet of Things. These autonomous devices and systems continue to scale to reduced dimensions at the millimeter scale and below, presenting major challenges to how we provide power to these devices. This article surveys existing approaches to harvest energy from the ambient or externally supplied sources including radio-frequency, optical, mechanical, thermal, nuclear, chemical, and biological modalities to provide electrical power for micro- and nano-systems. The outlook for scaling these energy conversion approaches to small dimensions is discussed in the context of both existing technologies and possible future nanoscience developments.
Highlights
Self-powered systems at the microscale and nanoscale that incorporate sensors, computation, and wireless data communications enable transformative networks for health, safety, and to enrich our lives
A range of energy harvesting approaches are needed for IoT2 devices since there will be differing access to energy sources according to the application of interest
The majority of energy harvesting approaches for miniaturized systems have targeted centimeter scale devices that enable a broad range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and wirelessly interconnected circuits
Summary
Self-powered systems at the microscale and nanoscale that incorporate sensors, computation, and wireless data communications enable transformative networks for health, safety, and to enrich our lives. IoT2 systems are enabled by a combination of advances including low-power circuits and heterogeneous integration (Oh et al, 2019). These small autonomous devices are often called motes as a part of a vision of “smart dust” (Warneke et al, 2001). Scaling dimensions below a centimeter presents new challenges such as rapidly decreasing efficiency of wireless power transfer at millimeter and smaller dimensions (Rabaey et al, 2011), while the system constraints for IoT2 devices cannot utilize conventional integration technologies involving printed circuit boards, current battery technologies, or physically accessible ports for wired connections (e.g., universal serial bus). Energy Harvesting in Nanosystems reduced to the micro- and nano-scale, with attention devoted to the outlook for IoT2 systems
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