Jun 19, 2009

Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones

A cell phone that never needs recharging might sound too good to be true, but Nokia says it's developing technology that could draw enough power from ambient radio waves to keep a cell-phone handset topped up.


The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. "Even if you are only getting microwatts, you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it's receiving," says Markku Rouvala a researcher from the Nokia Research Centre, in Cambridge, U.K.

[ more ]

No comments: