This is the typical academic research institution press release. The primary purpose is attracting industry interest in licensing intellectual property not disclosing information the general public would be interested to know. These are written by university / research institution intellectual property licensing groups and tend to be rather frustrating from the perspective of anyone who actually wants to know enough to assess likely real-world impact or probable time frames for widely available productization. The telltale phrase was in the last paragraph:
> "The researchers also aim to collaborate with industry and academic partners for the advancement of self-sustained smart systems based on on-chip SR rectifiers."
It's basically institutional research click-bait. A tease to attract interest from companies. Such licensing is a huge business for universities, potentially billions of dollars over time and across thousands of licenses. Those responsible for generating that revenue are essentially marketers, salespeople and IP/contract lawyers. The marketers interview the scientists and then write these releases. Their goal is to make the headline claims as expansive and exciting as possible so that it will get picked up by the press and amplified on social media because it's free advertising. However, they're careful to disclose as little as possible about the trade-offs, constraints or limitations as that might reduce media interest or discourage a potential licensor from contacting them. So they strive for "maximum claim, minimum detailed information" while still maintaining a vaguely plausible similarity to the informative release you and I (and probably the researchers) want.
The best chance you have of getting relevant info is to look up the lead researcher's name to see if they've published a paper. To me, the best-case is when a fellow HN reader who is in the field responds to the post with a summary of recent related research and their personal assessment on the actual state of real-world applicability, trade-offs and cost-effectiveness.
It sounds like you're assuming that RF energy harvesting is theoretical but in practice an unattainable dream. Samsung has for several years been selling a TV remote control that uses RF energy harvesting. It's real; it works outside the lab for actually-useful stuff.
In light of that, this news release has a reasonable amount of information about how their research improves on the prior state of the art. They shouldn't have to expend any effort in a release such as this to convince users that a technology that has already gone mainstream is real and useful and worth improving upon.
I've worked on many products which had hoped to incorporate it, but ultimately didn't.
It does work well for applications like you highlight which require very very low power levels for very intermittent use. Things like a desk calculator or a IR remote. As soon as you need any kind of "real" power for anything other than intermittent use it becomes a problem. You can only beam so much power without cooking everything in between, usually that amount of power is less than we need.
Right, the applicability of RF energy harvesting is fairly narrow, and will still be narrow even with this technology. But this news release didn't seem to be making any sensationalized claims about being able to power something like a phone this way.
