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by MochaDen 1074 days ago
From the paper:

"Throughout the test, the Arm Cortex-M0+ processor drew an average current from the compact Al-BPV of 1.4±0.4 μA with a voltage of 0.72±0.14 V. ... As the average power drawn from the compact Al-BPV during the 27 weeks of experimental run (1.05 μW) was larger than the minimum power required to run the CPU (i.e., 0.3 μW), it is likely that a smaller power-generating system could be used, or that more computationally intensive algorithms could be performed."

and:

"We programmed the Cortex-M0+ CPU to calculate a sum of consecutive integers as an example compute workload, and assess the correctness of the computation by verifying the sum against a precomputed value."

Pretty neat -- although it looks like they were clocking the chip at only 10 KHz.

2 comments

"although it looks like they were clocking the chip at only 10 KHz."

Yea, but isn't this the first step towards living space ships?

;)

No. Graphene was the first step. Graphene is always the first step.
That's a pretty small amount of power. 0.01 Wh if run for a year. For reference a CR2032 button cell has 67 times as much energy.
I think the algae is great but this also shows how very, very little power you need for small embedded devices these days. You could probably run this CPU off of almost anything. Moldy old pop tart? Go for it!