By Sharif Sakr, BBC News
The IMEC laboratory in Belgium is a surprising place. Nestled in the sleepy university town of Leuven, its low-key entrance gives little clue to the high-tech facility within. The heart of the complex is a massive, dust-free ‘clean room’, staffed by carefully-wrapped technicians. Here, microchips are developed based on sophisticated and carefully guarded designs. The ‘clean room’ where energy harvesting chips are manufactured But unlike unlike consumer chips from Intel or AMD, IMEC’s microchips are not meant to be powerful – they are the exact opposite. They have been tweaked to run on the tiniest amounts of power – so tiny, in fact, that they can run on energy harvested from small movements or temperature differences in the environment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11609667
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