IEDM seeks to reap the energy harvest

LONDON – The 57th annual International Electron Devices Meeting is devoting its traditional emerging technologies session this year to the topic of energy harvesting.

The session, organized by Suman Datta of Penn State University, comprises invited speakers from academia and industry and is set to discuss advances in energy-harvesting materials, devices and self-powered autonomous systems. The presentations promise a tour of the research landscape highlighting the most promising ways to progress towards circuits that can re-use their own waste energy and harvesting additional supplies from the environment.

Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is scheduled to discuss novel thermoelectric nanocomposite materials with enhanced efficiency for application in thermoelectric power generators. Chris Van Hoof of IMEC will describe how wafer-level integration of CMOS circuits and MEMS can be used to create electrostatic vibrational-energy harvesters as well as for thermocouple-based thermal energy harvesters.

Michael Flynn of the University of Michigan will discuss the challenges and opportunities in for building small microsystems that are powered using harvested RF energy. Dennis Buss of Texas Instruments is due to review the state-of-the-art in energy-efficient digital signal processing and ultra-low power CMOS implementation of same for remote wireless sensor networks and medical electronics.

Craig Schmidt of Medtronic will provide a critical comparison of energy harvest sources versus form-factor equivalent battery technologies, for possible application in implantable medical electronics.

IEDM is due to take place Dec. 5 to 7, 2011, at the newly renovated Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington D.C.


Related links and articles:

www.ieee-iedm.org

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