Manufacturing feasibility of miniaturised photovoltaic energy harvester for smart dust sensors

This project will address the needs of the fast growing Internet of Things (IoT) market by developing a manufacturing process to create the world's smallest and highest efficiency light energy harvesting (photovoltaic) module (mm^2 range) for smart dust sensors and motes. Smart dust sensors will require a mass-producible, low cost, highly efficient, ultra-small footprint and free shape power source that can operate in indoor and outdoor environments. Moreover, due to the large number of devices to be deployed in the field, a renewable power source will be essential to provide complete autonomy to these smart dust sensors. The power source should also provide sufficiently high voltage and power density to be combined with a rechargeable storage element (e.g. solid-state battery) and to supply energy to a smart dust sensor's low-power MCU (e.g. state-of-the-art sub-threshold ARM CPU implementations) and/or RF chipset. This project will build on Lightricity's Photovoltaic Energy Harvesting technology which has already exhibited superior low light level performance at the cm^2 level.