It has a been busy time lately with not much activity on the blog but for a good reason! We have put a lot of energy in developing new products which we will be introducing in the coming weeks. Anyway, with all the things going in the world I feel we all need to contribute in anyway we can to reduce our carbon footprint.

 I have been spending quite a bit of time researching alternative energy sources which I think is a bad name I prefer using natural energy sources! As far as energy consumption is concerned, ARM chips are well known for the low power requirements but my goal is to provide system that fully utilizes low power capabilities in the supported chips to deliver power efficient computing, stay tuned for more on that.

 Specific long term goal is to design a system that is totally off the grid but is a useful computing device. To do that it will have to harvest energy from the environment and store it. Storing energy is rather easy using recharchable batteries or supercaps, harvesting is what is interesting. There is a lot of energy around us in all kinds of forms like the obvious thermal, solar, wind and not so obvious like RF, sound, mechanical vibrations, thermal gradients. The only catch is to catch that energy!

A lot of activity is happening in the energy harvesting research around the world with people looking at all kinds of unconventional approaches like this one: Diode Power or how to rectify ambient thermal noise to produce DC power. A quick look at the power density calculations (provided they are correct!)  for the Diode Array and comparison with the solar arrays shows that Diode Array has a potential to be a better use for all those silicon wafers going into the solar panels. If Diode Array can produce DC power then it could be easily added to those silicon chips for a self powered system on a chip.

Check the website for Diode Array http://greenselfreliantenergy.com/