MANY prophets of information technology (IT) believe that the next big movement in their field will be the “internet of things”. This, they hope, will connect objects hitherto beyond the reach of IT’s tendrils so that, for example, your sofa can buzz your phone to tell you that you have left your wallet behind, or your refrigerator can order your groceries without you having to make a shopping list. That, though, will mean putting chips in your sofa, your wallet and your fridge to enable them to talk to the rest of the world. And those chips will need power, not least to run their communications.
Sometimes, this power will come from the electricity grid or a battery. But that is not always convenient. However Shyam Gollakota and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, think they have at least part of an answer to the problem. They propose to reconfigure a chip’s communications so that they need almost no power to work.
Most conceptions of the internet of things assume the chips in sofas, wallets, fridges and so on will use technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to communicate with each other—either...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1QLL0wL
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