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at the moment, they provide an extra element of heating for my living room ...
i suppose they can be used to recharge batteries, etc ... but my guess is that it will take some serious economic reason to push this from idea/research to practical application.
Take for example the energy harvesting in electric/hybrid cars. We all know that braking is a waste of energy, and if scavenged properly, it can extend the mileage of the car. While it was theoretical on paper, it has never been done until the push (by governments ?) for electric cars, where it is a vital sub-system that makes electric cars feasible. Now that the technology is somewhat "mature", it is being rolled out to most new production cars (petrol and electric).
I think the same will happen for consumer electronics ... but not at this point in time. I think the push now is to get low power consumption ... which means lower heat dissipation.
like most things, it needs to make economic sense.
Cant we use pyroelectric materials in the chip such that due to their property of generating temporary voltage when heated/cooled , this may help us inreusage of the energy that got discipated in chips.
If it has to be implemented on chip it may not take up too much space on the chip, also the impact of integrating the process in the manufacturing flow has to be well understood. Another thing to look at is how it effects the heat flow in the chip; it should generate real hot spots.
If it is external it may not complicate the PCB too much or significantly increase the BOM.
I agree with you Staf, but If we place such pyroelectric material on the top of chip, neither on PCB nor inside chip. this material may generate some voltage and help us in using the wasted energy.