Finally, a mobile that doesn't need charging
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DAILY MIRROR
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Claimed To Be First Of Its
Type, The Handset Harvests Wi-Fi Signals And Light To Operate
The first battery-free
mobile phone has been invented, sig nalling the end of chargers and
dying handsets. Engineers in the US say the phone can make and receive
calls using only a few microwatts of power, which it gets from light or
Wi-Fi signals.
The inventors also made powerhungry Skype calls using
the 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.
Professor Shyam Gollakota, a member of the research team at the University of Washington, said: “We have built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power.“
“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,“ he added.
The team, involving computer scientists and electrical engineers, eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions -converting analog signals which convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand. They said this process consumes so much energy that it's been
impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources. To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone's speaker. In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these the “transmitting“ and “listening“ modes.
Using components on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions, such as transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.
The battery-free phone still does require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The proto type has a power budget of 3.5 microwatts. The researchers demonstrated how they harvested this small amount of energy from two different sources. The battery-free phone prototype can operate on power gathered from ambient radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away . They also got power from ambient light with a tiny solar cell -roughly the size of a grain of rice.
Researcher Joshua Smith said: “The cellphone is the device we depend on most today . So if there were one device you'd want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cellphone. The proof of concept we've developed... could impact everyday devices in the future.“
Professor Shyam Gollakota, a member of the research team at the University of Washington, said: “We have built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power.“
“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,“ he added.
The team, involving computer scientists and electrical engineers, eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions -converting analog signals which convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand. They said this process consumes so much energy that it's been
impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources. To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone's speaker. In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these the “transmitting“ and “listening“ modes.
Using components on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions, such as transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.
The battery-free phone still does require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The proto type has a power budget of 3.5 microwatts. The researchers demonstrated how they harvested this small amount of energy from two different sources. The battery-free phone prototype can operate on power gathered from ambient radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away . They also got power from ambient light with a tiny solar cell -roughly the size of a grain of rice.
Researcher Joshua Smith said: “The cellphone is the device we depend on most today . So if there were one device you'd want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cellphone. The proof of concept we've developed... could impact everyday devices in the future.“
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