Devices - energy harvesting
Powercast
Texas Instruments
Ultra low power harvester power management IC with boost charger, and nanopower buck converter
... microwatts (µW) to milliwatts (mW) of power generated from a variety of high output impedance DC sources like photovoltaic (solar) or thermal electric generators (TEG) without collapsing those sources
from a variety of DC energy harvesting, high-impedance sources like photovoltaic (solar) or thermal electric generators (TEGs) without collapsing those sources.
Drayson Technologies http://getfreevolt.com/
40m pounds financing up to date
Energy harvesting might soon be seen in a number of everyday items. In the UK, for example, Drayson Technologies has developed Freevolt, an energy harvesting technology that harvest the
ambient radio frequency (RF) energy from created by mobile phones and WiFi transmissions.
Drayson has already used FreeVolt to power its Cleanspace tags for monitoring environmental
pollution, but now it’s working on bringing the same technology to credit cards.“Smart cards are becoming more secure, but like many technologies, they need more energy to
achieve the increased levels of security and privacy demanded by the market,” explains
company founder Lord Drayson, a former Labour government science minister. A credit card
equipped with Freevolt, for example, could capture RF energy when placed on card readers and
smartphones, and then use that to run on-card security functions such as biometrics, he says.