Image Credit: PecuniaLab
Prof. Pecunia’s breakthroughs in ultralow-power printed electronics and green indoor photovoltaics pave the way for low-cost smart devices that can be charged from ambient light.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ongoing revolution in electronics, which aims at the dissemination of smart devices in everyday objects and environments to provide them with ‘intelligence’ and data connectivity. This bears the promise of enhancing our quality of life as well as the efficiency and sustainability of our businesses. For their ubiquitous and seamless dissemination to become possible, however, smart devices should firstly be easy-to-make and low-cost, and should also be able to function with the tiny amount of energy available from the environment.
Over the last couple of decades, printing technologies have attracted a considerable amount of attention as a way of making electronics in an inexpensive manner, which would be ideal for IoT applications. However, a key longstanding challenge has been to develop printed electronics having a sufficiently low power consumption to address real-world applications.
Prof. Pecunia and his team at the Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials (FUNSOM), Soochow University, have recently developed a way to overcome this challenge. “We established a novel paradigm in printed electronics based on deep-subthreshold, balanced, ambipolar thin-film transistors”, Prof. Pecunia said. “This paradigm enables the use of one single semiconductor to achieve ultralow-power printed operation”. “We additionally demonstrated this paradigm using thin-film transistors featuring carbon nanotubes and a nanomaterials-based strategy to fine-tune their characteristics, which indeed delivered circuits with record-low power dissipation.” Building on his international network of scholarly connections, Prof. Pecunia led this effort in collaboration with partners from the University of Cambridge (UK), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (China), and ShanghaiTech University (China). This breakthrough is reported in the journal ACS Nano .
Aiming to develop self-powered electronics, Prof. Pecunia and his team have also been searching for ways to harvest ambient indoor energy, given that a large number of IoT applications require wireless indoor operation. While batteries are the conventional power source for wireless operation, their deployment in billions of IoT devices faces obvious practical and sustainability challenges.
Prof. Pecunia and his team have been investigating the conversion of light into electricity using new green semiconductors called lead-free perovskite-inspired materials. These materials are being developed as an environmentally-friendly alternative to a class of materials called lead-based perovskites, which have shown high photovoltaic performance but contain toxic lead.
“While the whole research community has been narrowly looking at lead-free perovskite-inspired materials to harvest energy from the sun, we discovered that they are much better suited for harvesting indoor light”, Prof. Pecunia said. “Using exemplar perovskite-inspired materials based on antimony and bismuth, we already achieved indoor photovoltaic efficiencies up to ~5%, which is already in the range of industry-standard indoor photovoltaics technology”. Prof. Pecunia led this effort in collaboration with partners from Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Cambridge (UK). The results are reported in the journal Advanced Energy Materials .
Given their technological significance, these results have attracted a considerable amount attention around the world, receiving coverage in more than 100 news items including by CGTN , China Daily , EurekaAlert! , PV Magazine , TechXplore , ScienceDaily , NanoWerk , the University of Cambridge , and Imperial College London . Prof. Pecunia’s breakthroughs in ultralow-power printed electronics and green indoor photovoltaics pave the way for low-cost smart devices powered by ambient light, which could enable a wide range of “place-and-forget” IoT applications in biomedicine, smart homes, infrastructure monitoring, and smart cities.
References
L. Portilla*, J. Zhao†, Y. Wang, L. Sun, F. Li, M. Robin, M. Wei, Z. Cui, L. G. Occhipinti†, T. D. Anthopoulos†, V. Pecunia†*, Ambipolar Deep-Subthreshold Printed-Carbon-Nanotube Transistors for Ultralow-Voltage and Ultralow-Power Electronics , ACS Nano, 2020, 14, 10, 14036–14046, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c06619.
Y. Peng*, T. N. Huq*, J. Mei*, L. Portilla, R. A. Jagt, L. G. Occhipinti, J. L. MacManus-Driscoll, R. L. Z. Hoye†, V. Pecunia†, Lead-Free Perovskite-Inspired Absorbers for Indoor Photovoltaics , Advanced Energy Materials, 2002761, 2020, DOI: 10.1002/aenm.202002761.
Editor: Danting Xiang