{"id":240513,"date":"2026-07-09T03:20:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T08:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/light-powered-chip-harvests-energy-computes-and-senses-chemicals-in-one-stack"},"modified":"2026-07-09T03:20:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T08:20:58","slug":"light-powered-chip-harvests-energy-computes-and-senses-chemicals-in-one-stack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/light-powered-chip-harvests-energy-computes-and-senses-chemicals-in-one-stack","title":{"rendered":"Light-powered chip harvests energy, computes and senses chemicals in one stack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-powered-chip-harvests-energy-computes-and-senses-chemicals-in-one-stack2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most contemporary portable electronics, including laptops, smartphones and smart watches, are powered by batteries that need to be recharged daily or every few days. Over the past decade, however, some engineers have been exploring the possibility of developing battery-free electronic devices that autonomously derive electricity from renewable sources, such as sunlight, indoor lighting or heat.<\/p>\n<p>A research team at Penn State University recently developed a compact integrated circuit (IC) that harvests energy solely from ambient light, using this energy to run computations and sense chemicals in its surroundings. This new chip, introduced in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41928-026-01624-1\" target=\"_blank\">a paper published in <i>Nature Electronics<\/i><\/a>, could enable the development of devices that never require charging and thus continue working uninterrupted even in environments where replacement batteries and electrical sockets are not available.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis work grew out of a broader question we have been asking in my group: Can we build electronic systems that do not simply sense information, but also process that information locally and power themselves from their environment?\u201d Saptarshi Das, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. \u201cMany future Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-computing systems will need to operate in remote or hard-to-access locations, where replacing batteries is impractical. We wanted to demonstrate a compact, fully integrated chip that combines energy harvesting, sensing and computation in a single monolithic three-dimensional architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most contemporary portable electronics, including laptops, smartphones and smart watches, are powered by batteries that need to be recharged daily or every few days. Over the past decade, however, some engineers have been exploring the possibility of developing battery-free electronic devices that autonomously derive electricity from renewable sources, such as sunlight, indoor lighting or heat. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1512,13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-mobile-phones","category-open-access","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}