Efficient power converter devised.

• Position: "Internet of Things"

The "Internet of things" is the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock soon will have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.

Those sensors will have to operate at very low powers in order to extend battery life for months or make do with energy harvested from the environment, but that means that they will need to draw a wide range of electrical currents. A sensor might, for instance, wake up every so often, take a measurement, and perform a small calculation to see whether that measurement crosses some threshold. Those operations require relatively little current but, occasionally, the sensor might need to transmit an alert to a distant radio receiver. That requires much larger currents.

Generally, power converters, which take an input voltage and convert it to a steady output voltage, are efficient only within a narrow range of currents but, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, researchers from the Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., presented a new power converter...