Texas Instruments wants to prove that less is indeed more

Imagine being able to power your smoke alarm in your house without ever needing to change your batteries. It would get it’s energy simply from the energy and vibrations from everything around it. That is the goal of Texas Instruments. They call it “energy scavenging”, and they say the reality is not that far away.

Employing the inventor of the original microchip Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments, currently the world’s third largest chip maker, is busy trying to break another electronic frontier. This time by creating a chip that uses an infinitesimally small amount of energy to operate. They actually did a demonstration showing a clock being run on…get this…grapes.