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Nokia mobile prototype harvests its own power Bernard Cole Cambridge, England - Nokia is showing off a prototype mobile phone that uses energy harvesting technology to recharge itself using only ambient radio waves emitted from mobile antennas, TV masts and other sources. The prototype was developed at the company’s research laboratory here, where prototypes have been build which can scavenge between 3 to 5 mW. The short-term goal is to get in excess of 20 mW, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely without having to recharge it. To actually generate enough energy to make or receive a call, the plan is to harvest as much as 50 mW which would be sufficient to slowly recharge the battery. The antenna and the receiver circuit are designed to pick up a wide range of frequencies — from 500MHz to 10GHz — and convert the electromagnetic waves into an electrical current, while the second circuit is designed to feed this current to the battery to recharge it. Nokia plans to use the technology in conjunction with other energy-harvesting approaches, such as solar cells embedded into the outer casing of the handset. The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. In order to achieve the 50mW threshold, company researchers think that the mobile device will have to harvest about 1,000 strong signals from a wide range of frequencies. To learn more, go to www.nokia.com.
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