State-of-the-art sensors use active electronics to detect and discriminate light^1,2,3, sound^4,5, vibration^6,7 and other signals^8,9. They consume power constantly, even when there is no relevant data to be detected, which limits their lifetime and results in high costs of deployment and maintenance for unattended sensor networks. Here we propose a device concept that fundamentally breaks this paradigm—the sensors remain dormant with near-zero power consumption until awakened by a specific physical signature associated with an event of interest. In particular, we demonstrate infrared digitizing sensors that consist of plasmonically enhanced micromechanical photoswitches (PMPs) that selectively harvest the impinging electromagnetic energy in design-defined spectral bands of interest, and use it to create mechanically a conducting channel between two electrical contacts, without the need for any additional power source. Our zero-power digitizing sensor prototypes produce a digitized output bit (that is, a large and sharp off-to-on state transition with an on/off conductance ratio >10¹² and subthreshold slope >9 dec nW^–1) when exposed to infrared radiation in a specific narrow spectral band (∼900 nm bandwidth in the mid-infrared) with the intensity above a power threshold of only ∼500 nW, which is not achievable with any existing photoswitch technologies.

最先进的传感器使用有源电子设备来检测和区分光^1,2,3，声音^4,5，振动^6,7和其他信号^8,9。即使没有相关数据要检测，它们也会不断消耗功率，这限制了它们的寿命，并导致无人值守的传感器网络的部署和维护成本很高。在这里，我们提出了一种设备概念，该概念从根本上打破了这种范式-传感器保持休眠状态且功耗几乎为零，直到被与事件相关的特定物理签名唤醒为止。特别是，我们展示了由等离子体增强型微机械光电开关（PMP）组成的红外数字化传感器，该传感器可选择性地收集感兴趣的设计定义的光谱带中的撞击电磁能，并利用它在两个电触点之间机械地创建导电通道，而无需需要任何其他电源。¹²和亚阈值斜率> 12月9日纳瓦^-1）时在特定暴露于红外辐射窄光谱带（〜 900nm的带宽在中红外）与上述只的功率阈值的强度〜 500纳瓦，这是无法实现的与任何现有的光电开关技术。