[HN Gopher] Sony develops energy harvesting module from electrom...
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Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnetic wave
noise
Author : leduyquang753
Score : 187 points
Date : 2023-09-12 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sony-semicon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sony-semicon.com)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I did my PhD on energy harvesting (specially focussing on hostile
| environments with high temperature or high radiation) around 15
| years ago and harvesting from stray EM radiation was the holy
| grail for room temperature stuff where vibrations or heat
| gradients couldn't be found.
|
| If you're willing to sacrifice always on connectivity and have a
| node report in on an infrequent basis then I always figured EM
| harvesting would be the way to go for most applications since
| even a tiny amount of energy can build up over time to become a
| useful amount.
|
| I knew I'd gone deep into this world when I started thinking that
| micro watts was a large amount of power!
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| About 10 years ago I did a research/what-if project, involving
| energy-harvesting tracker tags .. essentially a smaller/lighter
| version of the AirTag.
|
| It used energy-harvesting for the sensor packages, essentially
| charging caps if things got wet/moved/etc., but would boot up
| to do the sensor-data processing and communication (BLE/ANT) ..
| my lead on the project brought his dusty old home phone in, to
| give us all a stable power source, but we didn't really need it
| much - lots of 800mhz-900mhz in the city.
|
| Was fun to realize, even back then, that we are literally
| surrounded by energy and don't really have an energy problem.
| We have an _energy management problem_ , which we have yet to
| localize at the individual, and are instead spreading the
| problem across our _society_.
|
| But, in between builds on this project, I would often daydream
| of a scenario where computing devices ran simply on background
| radiation, and there was no longer any need for cables, really,
| in order to compute.
|
| Its fun to note we're getting closer and closer to that point.
| Okay, I could build a solar powered computer and also feel such
| satisfaction, but .. an all-in-one wafer that simply ran on
| cosmic noise?
|
| Hell yeah, gimme that, sparkies!!!
| user_7832 wrote:
| Specifically for moving object like air tags, watches
| "automatic" movements are already a "solution" that would be
| easy enough to implement, and probably even provide up to a
| few joules (!!) per day.
|
| (If you want to start a business off this idea feel free to
| contact me ;) half joking but half serious)
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| I have zero interest in this idea, business-wise - it is
| already a crowded space, Apple are mere new-comers to this
| - as the more you see these sensor nets grow, the more you
| realize we are making a big, big psycho-social 'smog'
| around the ways they can be used ..
|
| So yeah, I'd rather make musical instruments. If anyone
| wants to talk about that idea, I'm all in.
|
| :)
| xyproto wrote:
| I wish there was a small and affordable guitar pedal that
| had shimmer and bitcrush, and only that, with two
| potmeters and a passthrough button. I think the
| combination of those two effects is underused. Could it
| be done only with analog circuits?
| aramachandran7 wrote:
| With you on this, haha. Big tech has heavily crowded the
| wearables space, with questionable intentions and uses of
| personal health data.
|
| Additionally, when doing research around kinetic /
| thermal energy harvesting technology for a wearable
| design project (gesture recognizing smart ring) for
| school, we found modules to have far too low a volumetric
| energy density (W/mm^3) to be useful, where size matters
| more than anything else.
|
| Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as
| well...
| usrusr wrote:
| Big Tech may have crowded the wearables space, but Garmin
| is still quite a player in that field and the description
| "Big Tech" seems almost as bad a fit for them as "Olathe
| tinkerer collective" would be.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| >Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as
| well...
|
| Yeah, thats sort of the point. :)
| kian wrote:
| Provide a way to contact you, please.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| Ok, I did .. and thanks, needed to do that ..
| samtho wrote:
| I think there is space in the IoT market for a micro-watt
| platform that harvests energy from the environment. Always
| on connectivity is silly if it sits idle most of the time
| (think monitoring systems that take a temperature and
| moisture readings every 15 minutes), especially if it can
| communicate via a low power/low bandwidth channel.
|
| I build a system for an agriculture client like this with
| each node only having a very small solar panel (6in^2) and
| some super capacitors that kept it reporting data
| throughout the night. We even used performance metrics from
| the voltage being output by the solar panel to measure how
| cloudy it was. These devices reported via LoRa to a base
| station setup that was connected to a PoE system so we just
| ran a single Cat-6 STP line to a pole in the middle of the
| property.
| nocsi wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03
| 787...
|
| I think the other aspect of "always on" is that the
| operator isn't going to pick up the sensor years down the
| line. They're just going to leave it dead and buried,
| especially if the sensors have to live inside the earth
| There's ongoing work on harvesting electricity out of
| soil
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Where were you when I was wrapping up my dissertation? I've
| been in start ups ever since pretty much but not in that
| area sadly.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Haha I realised this idea after a fair bit of mulling, if
| it gives any comfort. I'm also coincidentally finishing
| my thesis, albeit a master's.
|
| In what areas of startup's have you been in? More of
| electrons or software or something?
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Manufacturing and now web/architecture (buildings not
| tech architecture) I left electronics behind many years
| ago sadly
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| This was basically my feeling when doing my PhD - there is
| energy everywhere and if we make systems power efficient
| enough there is no real reason we can't make significantly
| great use of that energy.
|
| That being said, it's not the energy per se that we can tap
| into, it's the gradient created as it dissipates/moves that
| we tap into. Heat is great, but not if it's uniform, solar is
| great, but not if it harvesting it casts an area in shadow
| that needs it, vibration is great so long as it doesn't damp
| and further load the system it's being taken from.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| [flagged]
| rpaddock wrote:
| " doesn't damp and further load the system it's being taken
| from."
|
| Don't all of these Harvesting systems load a system? For
| example one of the transmitters somewhere. Yes it is
| microwatts and no transmitter will notice a single unit.
| However if we start to talk large quantity of sensors, who
| is really paying the price? Otherwise we are admitting that
| Free Energy is a real thing.
|
| You and others may find the recently released Nexperia
| NBM5100 and NBM7100 of interest. While aimed at batteries
| it functionally translates high impedance power sources to
| lower impedance to charge up caps for IoT usage.
|
| https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-
| ics...
|
| https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-
| ics...
| amelius wrote:
| Well it may push for better EMI compliance.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| I mean yeah obviously thermodynamics aren't being
| violated, I think the base idea is that the background
| noise you're harvesting from was going to be lost as
| inverse square law losses anyway. Large amounts of
| sensors would ultimately be as a whole coupled to
| antennae broadcasting on those frequencies, damping them,
| and causing the gain circuits to automatically increase
| output power.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Oh for sure, it's relative to the system being harvested
| from and the amount of energy being extracted though.
|
| If it's a train cart/carriage then not really a problem
| as there is so much mass and vibration to go around, if
| it's the surface of a small industrial machine that needs
| to be reasonably balanced only producing a few hundred
| milli g then more of a concern.
| samus wrote:
| It would need a lot of these devices for the odd mW to
| really make a difference. It adds up, but it's in the
| ballpark of a router's status LEDs. These costs are
| already accounted for as part of the device's operation.
| Critical systems might start to better direct their
| transmissions and to reduce side bands instead of
| saturating the area with energy.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Does this sort of harvesting rely upon some internal
| accumulator like a capacitor before the energy could be fed
| elsewhere?
|
| Also a question if such harvester need its own power source to
| be able to operate?
|
| They cite a super wide range of EM freqs from Hz to MHz, and an
| efficient antenna...
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Yes, you need a reservoir to store the charge (energy) which
| in my case was the limiting factor to deployment in high
| temperature environments as capacitors get very leaky as
| temperature increases.
|
| Harvesters don't need their own power supply and ideally the
| system can come back to life from totally empty (meaning it
| doesn't need to be deployed with any charge level)
|
| I was doing my thing back before the packaged harvester
| management chips were available and I made a PIC based
| microcontroller system that could monitor the charge level in
| a capacitor fed from a piezoelectric vibration energy
| harvester and decide when to wake up and transmit a data
| reading based on the capacitors charge level.
|
| The trick was getting the PIC's sleep current draw low enough
| that the capacitor was charging even at milli g level
| vibration levels - from memory you can get a PIC's sleep
| current well down in the tens of nano amp range.
|
| PICs have a built in voltage reference that is stable (a
| zener or schotkey diode from memory of 0.6V?) and a way to
| read what the Vsupply (basically the capacitor) is compared
| to it. So the PIC would wake up every 30 seconds, check
| Vsupply to the built in reference and, when high enough fully
| wake up, take and transmit a reading and go back to sleep.
|
| From memory I got it running at 50mg transmitting every few
| minutes.
|
| I got a nice journal publication in IEEE for that work.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Don't be so modest. Citation needed. :-)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Lol, thanks - best link I can find:
|
| https://digital-
| library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/...
|
| Looks like it was an IET journal, I think my IEEE
| publications were all conferences.
| biomcgary wrote:
| The linked paper made sense once I realized mg is not
| milligrams. You sound like a former academic like me. All
| those papers/citations were so important (publish or
| perish), but now you just have to get things done, not so
| much writing.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Cool project. Thanks for sharing the details!
|
| So the harvester sustains itself, keeps filling up the
| bucket, and periodically reports out the progress.
|
| I guess it's a balancing game, as the filling up process is
| probably slow, so the target's draw needs to be low too.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Thanks, it didn't report back progress of charging, it
| was connected to a sensor (light sensor in this case but
| could be anything really) and would transmit that back to
| a base station.
|
| The main use of energy harvesting is for powering
| wireless sensor nodes, so this was a simple
| implementation of that.
| zeitgeistcowboy wrote:
| I thought it was illegal to use an antenna to harvest RF energy.
| But, I guess not in these situations at least. All I can find
| from the FCC on this is https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-
| reception-devices-rule Can anyone comment on how these devices
| are legal?
| solardev wrote:
| Isn't Sony Japanese? Would the FCC have any jurisdiction over
| them?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| If they wanted to sell product or ics into products that will
| be used here, then yes. But if it's only for out of US
| market, then no.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Of course it's perfectly legal.
|
| It's the whole reason radio was invented.
|
| If it were illegal, AM crystal radios would also have to be
| illegal. That's where radio all started.
|
| Also, your phone harvests RF energy every time you charge it
| wirelessly with a Qi charger.
|
| Lots of implanted devices are powered this way too
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Doesn't the human body also generate electromagnetic noise?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I don't know what magnitude of noise is made by the body's
| electrical system, but everything above absolute zero will emit
| some EM radiation.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Well, all electromagnetically interacting matter right? I
| don't think neutrinos etc will do so
| foobiekr wrote:
| The nice thing about RF harvesting is you can have a beacon that
| keeps an area charged. Atmosic powered remotes with some TVs do
| this by having a beacon in the TV providing power.
| xyproto wrote:
| I assume this is already being used for spying on people, since
| the military has the incentive and resources to stay a few years
| ahead of what is publicly known.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Okay, this is pretty cool. Effectively lowering the EM noise
| floor in their vicinity by rectifying the energy is a neat trick.
| The catch has always been that the level of energy was such that
| the conversion circuitry for ambient noise was unable to process
| enough to both power itself and provide a bit extra (efficiency
| losses effectively prevented any net energy conversion). That
| they managed to do that is what I find so impressive.
|
| The second thing is the low frequency stuff. Its taught in most
| EE programs that you can use an antenna that is tuned to a
| frequency to transfer energy wirelessly from xmitter to receiver
| (see NFC or RFID) but antennas that tune sub-MHz frequencies are
| typically quite long in order to have some level efficiency. That
| they do this by exploiting geometry of various conducive elements
| _and_ get enough energy is super impressive too.
|
| If you followed the old BEAM stuff[1] that Mark Tilden promoted,
| you could see some ideas about two-phase devices that live in a
| "collect" phase charging up an energy reservoir and then an
| "execute" phase where they dump that energy doing their thing.
| BEAM was focused on robotics and bug like behaviors but there is
| no reason you couldn't have a sensor that measures temperature
| and humidity and transmits that to a receiver somewhere. Or a
| passive "game" camera that, once it has collected enough energy,
| takes a snapshot when it detects motion and sends that along.
|
| I'll be interested to see this stuff get commercialized and
| designed in. It does have shades of "Smart Dust"[2] though which
| is pretty ripe for abuse.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics
|
| [2] https://www.nanowerk.com/smartdust.php
| codethief wrote:
| I suppose "noise" requires a more precise definition here - I
| assume they don't mean a thermal background. Or otherwise I'm
| left wondering how this squares with the Second Law of
| Thermodynamics: You start with high entropy (thermal noise) and
| end up with low entropy (a charged battery)?
| goodpoint wrote:
| The article is just marketing. RF energy harvesting has been
| around for more than a decade.
| tzs wrote:
| The ones I've read about before harvested from radio such as
| WiFi or broadcast TV. With this one they are talking about
| harvesting from EM noise from things that aren't intentional
| transmitters. Is that new?
| af3d wrote:
| The novelty seems to be the form-factor. It's energy harvesting
| made simpler for low-power applications. (A small
| microprocessor for example, LED's, sensors, etc.)
| itishappy wrote:
| Come now, we've been at this for quite a bit longer than a
| decade!
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US685955
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| Talk to the plants! They'll tell ya!
| eig wrote:
| This is Sony, so their electrical engineers clearly know what
| they are doing.
|
| But at the same time I can't understand how such a thing works
| using pure white noise. Feynman famously described (and
| disproved) a similar energy-harvesting device [0] except one that
| uses mechanical noise and a mechanical rectifier instead of the
| electrical noise and electrical rectifier of Sony. He showed that
| such a device will eventually stop working due to the second law
| of thermodynamics. Why doesn't that happen in the Sony chip?
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Didn't Nokia have a proof of concept mobile using something like
| this ten years ago?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Relevant stats
|
| - Harvesting from several dozen mW to several dozen mW of power.
|
| - Harvesting from Hz to MHz freq EM noise
|
| - 7x7 mm component footprint
|
| I'm impressed; even though this idea isn't 100% new, the
| execution seems solid!
| sova wrote:
| Wow. Scientists at Stanford figured this out to a demonstrable
| idea over ten years ago I believe. I am looking for the article,
| ambient power for IoT devices.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Wardenclyffe on a chip. Neat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
| amelius wrote:
| What if someone tries to beam energy across the room, and this
| device starts acting as a man in the middle?
| surfingdino wrote:
| That's some sleeper cell!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Seems like a potential nightmare when your sensor network's
| operation is contingent on one badly tuned power circuit in a
| crappy Chinese LED floodlight in the janitors closet being
| perpetually left on.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Don't worry, by the time you work out the source of your data
| outage, Sony will have a wireless power module to sell you as
| well. It will be wildly inefficient however, so you'll want to
| only run it when there is actually a data outage. By the time
| you work that out, there will be orchestration services
| available that notice the outage and respond by temporarily
| flipping on the wireless power module. A sensor on one side of
| the room driving a machine on the other side, and somehow we've
| got it dependent on a cloud service on the other side of the
| planet. The future is looking bright.
| mabbo wrote:
| Seems like an interesting way to identify machines that are
| breaking down.
|
| If these devices can be built cheaply, just place them all over
| a factory, chirping their ID whenever they have enough power to
| do so. You map the IDs to locations and get a real-time map of
| where there's EM noise spitting out. When the map starts
| changing from it's usual patterns, then you identify the source
| of that change.
| vestrigi wrote:
| Question is whether this could harvest enough energy to store
| it in a small battery to continuously provide power. But really
| sounds frightening if you change the setup of a few appliances
| and then suddenly half of your autonomously powered devices
| don't get enough power anymore because the noise is not high
| enough anymore.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| On a more serious note, I'm sure that if you needed a
| reliable network, you would use purpose built emitters to
| power everything.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| You Must Construct Additional Pylons
| rusabd wrote:
| could be very useful in-doors where solar is not possible
| and wiring is not practical. A lot of sensors do not have
| to be on all the time - occasional reading is more than
| enough.
| tzs wrote:
| It is not just ambient electrical noise that contains usable
| energy. Others have demonstrated practical sensor energy
| harvesting from ambient WiFi and ambient broadcast TV signals.
| I'd expect that the Sony device can probably use those too, so
| if you've got WiFi in your building you should be fine.
|
| If there is ambient radio, you can also use that for extremely
| low power data transmission from your sensors. The trick there
| is to not actually transmit any of your own energy. You instead
| either absorb or reflect the ambient radio. This is called
| backscatter communications.
|
| Here is a video showing a demonstration of both energy
| harvesting from ambient radio and backscatter data transmission
| [1].
|
| If you use WiFi signals as your ambient radio for backscatter,
| the research group in that video has also demonstrated that you
| can make your backscatter data stream match standard WiFi
| protocols so that you can use ordinary WiFi equipment for the
| receiver.
|
| The above was fairly short range, but even so there are a lot
| of interesting applications. For instance you might want to
| have moisture sensors inside a wall to detect water leaks
| early. If your sensors are powered by ambient EM energy (noise
| or radio), you don't have to limit the sensors to places where
| you can easily reach them later to change batteries. They are
| fine if they are behind brick or drywall with no openings.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9cbxLSOkE
| jareklupinski wrote:
| if the intent of the system was to monitor energy waste, no
| signal is good signal :)
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Energy harvesting makes more sense for ultra-low-power IoT
| sensors with a battery life of 2-3 years being extended to 5-10
| years.
| coffeeshopgoth wrote:
| So, to capture this better, would you then design your factory
| with acoustics in mind (more so than now), too? Like areas where
| soundwaves would bounce to resonate and concentrate to hit
| sensors?
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I did some work in this area about a decade ago. The issues I ran
| into involved converting the energy into something that can be
| stored. If semiconductors are used for detection/rectification,
| the band-gap voltage must be overcome before any energy is
| recovered. Specialized devices with very low band-gap voltages
| are available, but losses are still significant.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is what FreeVolt[0] is - Oxford spinout in which I have a
| microscopic number of shares.
|
| [0] https://freevolt.tech
| appplication wrote:
| This is really cool, but also seems rather indexed on physical
| cards. I have to imagine as we go towards more tech centric
| physical checkouts, we're probably leaning more into device-
| based methods (phone, watch, etc). I imagine we will see less
| physical cards moving forward due to devices being able to fill
| this niche in a more secure way.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Agreed - that's the commercialisation approach they've gone
| with, but it's not the only one. I think access cards have
| legs still because corporations won't necessarily want to
| enroll people into BYOD situations (what happens if my phone
| battery dies, etc), nor issue everyone phones, and cards are
| just simple to administrate. But yeah I can imagine the
| opportunity isn't infinite.
| rpaddock wrote:
| The rather obscure semi. company E-Peas has been making similar
| harvesting chips for a while:
|
| https://e-peas.com/product/aem13920-dual-source-energy-harve...
|
| The Nexperia chips are also worth looking at, in that they
| translate high impedance sources to low enough to charge a cap:
|
| https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
|
| https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
| allan_s wrote:
| Just to get a raw idea, can this accumulate enough power to
| gather a gps position and send it over wifi / 4g nb-iot signal
| ? I have only very basic knowledge so not enough to make an
| estimation of the kind of things this can power
| rpaddock wrote:
| While possible it is unlikely. It would take a considerable
| amount of time to accumulate that amount of energy needed
| from these sources. These systems are generally used for
| transmitters that transmit for a couple of seconds at most
| and may be off for the rest of the day. Enough energy would
| have to be accumulated to run the GPS long enough to get a
| valid fix etc.
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