University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries—a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.
The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a
base station.
The new technology is detailed in a paper published July 1 in the
Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
"We've built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero
power," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. "To achieve the really, really
low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed."
The team of UW computer scientists and electrical engineers eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions—converting analog signals that convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand. This process consumes so much energy that it's been impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-battery-free-cellphone-harvesting-ambient-power.html#jCp
this is tight. It'll be interesting to see what type of tech will develop off this idea.