Ultralow power transistors that could function for years without a battery

It is a "Schottky-barrier indium-gallium-zinc-oxide thin-film transistor operating in the deep subthreshold regime." According to the original article in Science Mag. the currents involved are significantly lower then of the other possible technologies. It's not only that the OFF current is apparently an order of magnitude lower (as a property of the use of that material, IGZO) it's that the transistor does the useful work in the "almost off" state (as they operate it in that regime). The low currents typically mean also "slow" but for the applications intended it could be exactly what's enough, and the advantages huge.

I don't see that they give any exact estimate of some real life application, it can be that the practical uses technologically introduce some limitations that aren't discussed. At least it looks promising.

Thanks, here they describe the idea and the problems they faced:

http://ambiqmicro.com/spot-platform

"Operation at such low voltages is problematic due to susceptibility to noise, high sensitivity to temperature, and variability due to process drift. In developing the SPOTTM platform, Ambiq Micro has addressed all of these challenges by redesigning every analog and digital circuit in the chip to adapt for the temperature, voltage, and manufacturing variations that are problematic at these voltage levels."

It is neither. As the summary at the top of the article says, it is a transistor that draws very little power.

It's not much better. That graph looks like nonsense and it doesn't really explain things. The abstract is fine but only explains a small fraction of the article by itself.

Scihub link: http://science.sciencemag.org.sci-hub.cc/content/354/6310/30...

"Wearable devices and environmental sensors ideally should consume very little power to avoid the need for batteries that would have to be replaced. Lee and Nathan developed a thin-film transistor (TFT) from In-Ga-Zn-O thin films. To make the material less conductive, the films were fabricated to avoid oxygen vacancies. The TFT operated at ultralow power (less than 1 nW) and at switching voltages of less than 1 V with very high intrinsic gain. The devices work by changing the height of the so-called Schottky barrier formed between the semiconductor gate material and the metal drain contact."

There's something about running entirely on leakage power, never powering on into the normal region? I can't figure out what they're talking about with scavenging power at all; if it could scavenge why would it only last 'months or years'.