An energy scavenging microsystem based on thermoelectricity for battery life extension in laptops

This paper presents a solution to increase the nominal lifetime of batteries in laptops. New thin-film materials offer potentially greater efficiencies when converting heat to electricity using the thermoelectric effect. Applied to microprocessors, this technology can mitigate a number of critical problems as the critical amount of heat produced by laptops. The use of a thermoelectric scavenging microsystem based on the Seebeck effect can address this problem, by extracting waste heat from a high-end microprocessor, converting the heat to electricity using thin-film technology in silicon compatible materials. Applying a thermoelectric micro converter (that was fabricated using thin-films of bismuth and antimony tellurides) to a temperature gradient of 60°C, it is possible to obtain an efficiency of 3% and increase in the same amount, the lifetime of batteries.