We’re still used to thinking that low-power chips for “mobile” or “Internet-of-Things (IoT)” applications will be battery powered…but the near ubiquity of lithium-ion cells powering batteries could be threatened by capacitors and energy-harvesting circuits connected to photovoltaic/thermoelectric/piezoelectric micro-power sources. At ISSCC2015 in San Francisco last week, there were several presentations on novel chip designs that run on mere milliWatts (µW) of power, and the most energy efficient circuit blocks now target nanoWatt (nW) levels of power consumption. Two presentations covered nW-scale microprocessor designs based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ core, and a 500nW energy-harvesting interface based on a DC-DC converter operating from 1µm available power was shown by a team from Holst Centre/imec/KU Leuven working with industrial partner OMRON.

Read more on this in MicroWatt Chips shown at ISSCC available at SemiMD.

—E.K.