Scientist have created tiny supercapacitators that can be embedded directly on a microchip, a game-changer that promises smaller, more powerful devices.
As the semiconductor industry begins to adjust to a new roadmap, research on microchips is being focused less on Moore’s Law (the arithmetic increase through time in the power of microchips) but instead on incremental changes related to the developing Internet of Things, such as increasing RAM or integrating gyroscopes or GPS sensors.
An important part of these changes include building more efficient energy storage devices to power these additional sensors. This development of high-performance batteries would go a long way to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The problem, however, is that miniaturized energy storage devices are not only difficult to produce but they often fail to function well with other electronics.