Over the past few decades, the use of portable and solar electronics has grown steadily. Recent developments in the field have led to the design of a number of mechanisms that can be used to generate electrical energy from a variety of sources including thermal, solar, strain etc.

RF Monolithics, Inc. has announced that RF modules expert Tim Cutler, director of M2M Business for RFM, will be performing live demonstrations of energy harvesting for the RFM RF modules in the company's upcoming exhibit at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC (News - Alert)) in Silicon Valley April 26 -29, 2010. Energy harvesting techniques are emerging as environmental friendly energy sources.

This live demonstration will show how emerging harvesting techniques via solar power can provide continuous power for the operation of RFM's low-power modules for wireless sensor applications.

Tim Cutler states that energy harvesting has huge potential to reduce maintenance costs of eventual and repeated battery replacement in the operation of RF radio modules  and the energy harvesting industry has begun to develop technologies to take advantage of varied sources of micropower  including solar, vibration, thermal, and RF energy. Cutler adds that there may be one or two optimal energy harvesting technologies that will be capable of providing the micropower needed to operate RF radio modules in wireless sensor and M2M applications.

The energy harvesting wireless temperature sensor designed by RFM that has been running in an outdoor environment for a number of months, will be demonstrated at ESC.

This sensor is designed to handle the realities of energy harvesting - namely that the source of the energy is not always present and its presence or absence is not predictable.

Using solar power, the system must obviously store energy during the daylight hours for use at night time, but also handle days with limited or no sunlight. The design also gives answers to the practical questions such as that the earth doesn't go from total darkness to total sunlight and thus the source of energy gradually appears as the sun rises in the morning.