Recently, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego, developed a temperature sensor with a power of only 113 pico-watts, less than 1-billionth of a watt. In the future, this almost zero-power temperature sensor is expected to be used in products such as wearable devices, implantable devices, smart home monitoring devices, IoT devices and environmental monitoring devices.
background
Power consumption, for electronic products has always been one of the key factors.
As the author before "the world's first battery-free phone: get energy from the surrounding environment! "One article describes one of the most critical technical challenges that electronic products such as cell phones can sustain by absorbing the energy of the surrounding environment are still reduced power consumption. Reducing power consumption is important, even for battery-dependent electronics, which not only reduces energy consumption but also extends battery life.
Innovation
Recently, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego, developed a temperature sensor with a power of only 113 pico-watts, less than 1-billionth of a watt. The current power requirements of the most advanced temperature sensors have been reduced to tens of nanowatts, and the power consumption of this sensor developed by the Mercier team is 1/628 of that.
Mercier is also co-director of the University of California San Diego wearable sensor lab. His energy-saving micro-system lab at the University of California, San Diego, the theme is to build this ultra-low power, small electronic devices. His research team focuses mainly on improving the energy efficiency of individual parts of an integrated circuit, thereby reducing overall system power consumption. However, a good example of this is the temperature sensor used for medical devices or smart thermostats.
The paper for this study was published in the Journal of Science in June 30th.
technology
Their new scheme minimizes the power consumption in two domains: the current source and the temperature are converted to digital readings.
Researchers have used so-called "gate-drain" transistors to build this ultra-low-power current source. A weak current in such a transistor leaks through the electron barrier or gate. Transistors usually have a gate that switches the flow of electrons. But with the ever-shrinking transistor size and thinner gate materials, it does not stop electrons from leaking through, making a phenomenon known as "quantum tunneling."
Gate leakage is considered problematic in microprocessors and precision analog circuits. But here, researchers took advantage of it, they used these weak currents to power the circuit. Hui said:
"Many researchers try to eliminate the leakage current, but we have used it to build ultra-low-power current sources."
Using these current sources, researchers have developed a lower-power method for digitizing temperature. This process typically involves passing a current through a resistor, changing the resistance of the resistor with temperature, and measuring the resulting circuit before using a high-power analog-to-digital converter to convert that voltage to the relevant temperature.
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