Avnet Abacus and Cymbet have teamed up to demonstrate energy harvesting with solid state batteries at Embedded World, Nuremburg, using Texas Instruments, Atmel and Silicon Labs microcontroller and wireless reference designs.

Energy harvesting demonstrations will include various different technologies: flexible photovoltaic cells; thermal gradient harvesting using a thermoelectric harvester; vibration harvesting using a piezoelectric transducer; and RF induction charging. Cymbet evaluation kits and reference designs for all these harvesters are available from Avnet Abacus.

There is also a real time clock (RTC) power hold-over circuit based on a Cymbet CBC-EVAL-06 evaluation kit which combines an EnerChip CBC3112 ‘uninterruptible PSU in a Chip’ with the Microcrystal RV-2123-C2 – claimed to be the world’s smallest integrated RTC module.