There's plenty of energy at the bottom (micro and nano scale nonlinear noise harvesting)

The future of mobile Information and Communication Technology will be strongly affected by our success in solving the question of how to power very small devices. Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic devices. Among the different solutions, micro scale vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations mainly in the form of random fluctuations, i.e. noise. In this paper we briefly discuss the role of micro-energies and the possibility to harvest them by employing nonlinear dynamical systems.