If you can imagine a world of connected sensors embedded in walls, roads and consumer goods you probably don’t want to imagine having to change the battery on them every six months or year. Even as we build out more connected products we’re still limited by battery life. But at companies such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, ARM and many more, researchers are doing their best to make chips that can generate their own energy and then build out systems that can store and use that precious power.

Without delving into physics, energy is all around us, and the challenge for chip firms is figuring out how to capture enough energy and then to store it for usage later. Sources like solar or kinetic energy aren’t always available. An additional challenge is figuring out how to build sensors that can take advantage of the lower amounts of energy harvested by…