黑科技：神马，以后手机打电话耍朋友圈儿不用电池啦？

Powering the internet of things Passive voice Redesigning Wi-Fi may let devices communicate more easily redesign |ˌri:dɪˈzaɪn| 重新设计 Mar 5th 2016 | From the print edition MANY prophets of information technology (IT) believe that the next big movement in their field will be the “internet of things”. This, they hope, will connect objects hitherto beyond the reach of IT’s tendrils so that, for example, your sofa can buzz your phone to tell you that you have left your wallet behind, or your refrigerator can order your groceries without you having to make a shopping list. That, though, will mean putting chips in your sofa, your wallet and your fridge to enable them to talk to the rest of the world. And those chips will need power, not least to run their communications. 1 prophet [ˈprɒfɪt] 先知2hitherto [ˌhɪðəˈtu:] 迄今；直到某时 3 tendril |ˈtendrəl| （攀缘植物的）卷须 卷须状物（如鬈发） 4 buzz发出蜂鸣声 5 grocery |ˈgrəʊsər | 食品杂货店（在美国英语中grocery store常用以指supermarket）6 not least especially 特别；尤其 Sometimes, this power will come from the electricity grid or a battery. But that is not always convenient. However Shyam Gollakota and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, think they have at least part of an answer to the problem. They propose to reconfigure a chip’s communications so that they need almost no power to work. Most conceptions of the internet of things assume the chips in sofas, wallets, fridges and so on will use technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to communicate with each other—either directly, over short ranges, or via a base-station connected to the outside world, over longer ones. For a conventional chip to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal requires two things. First, it must generate a narrow-band carrier wave. Then, it must impress upon this wave a digital signal that a receiver can interpret. Following Moore’s law, the components responsible for doing the impressing have become ever more efficient over the past couple of decades. Those generating the carrier wave, however, have not. conventional |kənˈvenʃənl|依照惯例的；遵循习俗的；墨守成规的；普通平凡的 Dr Gollakota and his team reasoned that it should be possible to separate the jobs of generation and impression. The system they have designed has a central transmitter (which might be built into a Wi-Fi router) that broadcasts a pure carrier wave. Dr Gollakota’s new chips then impress binary data on this carrier wave by either reflecting it (for a one) or absorbing it (for a zero). Whether a chip reflects or absorbs the signal depends on whether or not its aerial is earthed, which is in turn controlled by a simple switch. reason 推理；推论；推断 binary |ˈbaɪnəri| 二进制的（用0和1记数） aerial [ˈeəriəl] 天线 Not having to generate its own carrier wave reduces a chip’s power consumption ten-thousandfold, for throwing the switch requires only a minuscule amount of current. Moreover, though Dr Gollakota’s prototypes do still use batteries, this current could instead be extracted from the part of the carrier wave that is absorbed. 1 minuscule |ˈmɪnəskju:l| 极小的；微小的 prototype原型；雏形；最初形态 2 extracted索取，设法得到 The chips in this system, which Dr Gollakota plans to unveil on March 17th at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Santa Clara, California can, he claims, transmit data at a rate of up to 11 megabits a second to smartphones or laptops over 30 metres (100 feet) away, and through walls. Though that rate is worse than standard Wi-Fi it is ten times better than the low-energy form of Bluetooth which is the current favourite for the internet of things. 1 Symposium [sɪmˈpəʊziəm] 专题讨论会；研讨会；小型讨论会 2 Santa Clara [ˈsæntə ˈkleərə] Dr Gollakota has helped found a company, Jeeva Wireless, to commercialise his research and he predicts that passive Wi-Fi chips, as he calls them, will be in production in less than two years. Eventually, he hopes, the idea behind his system—of generating carrier waves centrally—might be adapted for use in mobile phones. That would mean base stations providing a carrier wave, and phone users making calls, sending text messages and connecting to the internet without constantly having to recharge their handsets.