Development of multi-source micro energy harvesting power management devices

ended

Many IoT market leaders incl. ARM Holdings (the world's leading semiconductor IP supplier) predict that the IoT will begin to free itself from battery power in 2018. Without reducing the reliance on battery power, there is a significant roadblock in reaching trillions of devices. Future devices will need to be self-sufficient and operate without any battery swaps or any human intervention for decades. This will be made possible through harvesting of all the available ambient energy in the environment, for example: Thermal energy associated with static and dynamic temperature differences; Vibration energy e.g. from vehicles driving over a bridge or oil following through a pipe; Light energy from indoor artificial lighting. For these predictions to be realised, the current roadblock is micro energy harvesting systems that can effectively capture all available energy using just one energy management device. The technical challenge is that these ambient energy sources have widely different electrical characteristics that must be managed e.g: photovoltaic and thermoelectric harvesters are low-voltage DC, resistive, “trickle” sources; electrodynamic harvesters are high-voltage, inductive, “pulsed” sources whilst piezoelectric harvesters are high-voltage AC, capacitive, “bursty” sources. Trameto is a UK-based fabless semiconductor business that is focusing on bringing ‘HarvestAll’ to market. HarvestAll enables energy harvesting from any-single harvester type, many-identical harvesters and multiple-different harvester types. This functionality is not currently available in the market. This project will help us to: further strengthen our market understanding, formalise existing and build new relationships with partners across the energy harvesting ecosystem to develop our supply chain and routes to market. This project will take us closer to having an exploitable technology that will achieve an ROI of 13.9:1 through sales of our novel energy management chip.