I’ve been toying with a chip that harvests power from an NFC phone near by and it’s super neat to have a microcontroller just do its thing with no direct attached power supply.
It's interesting regardless; I'm just trying to understand some of its potential (and maybe these things can be overcome or become irrelevant for certain uses).
The chip I’m playing with is the NAC1080 - supposedly designed for small lock motors but I’m using it to update an eink display on tap
If you can run a microcontroller on a fraction of a milliwatt (which is entirely feasible) then it might not matter that you're wasting another 10 milliwatts on wireless power delivery. Depends what your energy source is.
And that's TDP!