This new chip developed by a team of MIT researchers is able to harvest energy from three different sources simultaneously: namely being light, heat and vibrations.

A sophisticated control system is able to rapidly switch between the three sources at all times to prevent any of that energy from going to waste. The energy from the secondary sources stored in capacitors will be picked up later as opposed to existing systems that simply switch between sources based on what's most plentiful.

Sauray Bandyopadhyay explains that those disparate sources could be a big advantage since many of these sources are intermittent and unpredictable and could in turn lead the chip being used in a range of different applications where batteries or existing energy harvesting methods aren't enough.

[PhysOrg, MIT]