Energy storage is never an end in itself, but only a means to assure the short or long term operation of an electronic device. You may want to keep some critical functions alive for a few minutes during power failure, or you may want to restart a device with a drained battery as soon as it gets a little bit of light; you may want to store a tiny amount of energy or you may want to have a big backup power pack available to recharge your smartphone. Common to all of these cases is the intelligent handling of available energy.
Common household appliance (microwave ovens, laundry machines, etc) run an internal clock, that is reset each time power is interrupted. Inserting a very low-power real-time clock and a tiny capacitor saves the time settings and prevents the user from having to reconfigure his appliance after a loss of power.
When a solar watch ran completely empty and stopped operating, it usually took a long time before the rechargeable battery had accumulated enough energy to restart the watch. Our custom-designed “quick start” chips, now integrated in many solar watch models, allow startup in seconds rather than hours.
A durable, lightweight and compact solar powered charger is capable of replenishing your smartphone within just an hour. The charger’s 3Ah battery is connected to the solar cells through one of our custom-designed power management integrated circuits. Exposing the charger to sunlight for one hour allows 10 hours of operation for its LED light.