Regarding presenting the killer application for this, here is my perspective:
The UB20M is for application in a specific textile energy harvesting technology that we are working on: we are still developing sensor materials that go with this (microstructured ferroelectret foams with up to GOhm output impedances), integrated maximum power tracking on a nW budget, and a variable-ratio switched-capacitor converter. This takes time, perhaps a decade. And so while it is an application for the voltage detector, it's hardly a commercial opportunity, as the product doesn't exist yet. That is the space we work in. We would not get funding to make a product, as that would be seen as a commercial activity.
As part of this we needed to sense voltage levels and detect spikes of incoming power without draining the supercap storage. This is dealt with by a 0.3x0.3mm analogue circuit with 40 different transistors (different W/L ratios, 3 Vds ratings, 2 thresholds), all operating in sub-threshold mode. We thought this might be useful on its own, so in a move that is untypical of UK universities, the University gave us funding to make a batch of 1400 sot-23 devices. Europractice and IMEC worked hard to find suppliers who could dice and package such small quantities on our budget. The 10 devices that we tested (it takes ages) work as expected from post-layout simulation, so now we have a low-power analogue IC that beats the voltage detector competition significantly on 4 parameters (input current, threshold, max input V, output leakage), and is arguably worse on 2 further parameters (temperature range, dVin/dt range).
It takes a lot of courage to put raw, unpolished work out there for debate, but I believe that is the role and duty of Universities, rather than hiding their stuff in fancy and expensive journal publications.
We have spent no time on developing applications and products, in fact we've only had these devices for 2 months! We just wanted to get them out there quickly and feel the love of application engineers
We do have 3 or 4 circuits running with devices in the previous research packages (84 pin). Most of these would seem pointless to most people, or at least not encourage them to think about how they could use this device. E.g. we have a boost converter that uses 7 of these devices (e.g. three in a ring with some tuning to create a nW quiescent low-duty gate driver). We have an RF wake-up circuit with a very high sensitivity. The only way of getting the same sensitivity is to ask for a research chip from the world's leading research group on this topic. With our device you can build this on a breadboard. But are there applications for this yet? We don't know. And an application engineer would want the 7 devices put onto one die, so again it's a complicated example.
We want to create the raw material that encourages others to see if they might have a use. We have an online form at bristol.ac.uk to request samples, and this has been populated by some great ideas, which, and we are very open about this, we would not have come up with. I WISH I would tell you about them, some are ingenious, and no doubt some won't work out. But obviously we can't, as these are not our ideas. I can say though that IR has featured in 3 of the applications which I think are great.
I really do understand that you don't like the TV application, because if regulation came in to reduce standby power, there would be other ways of reducing this to minimal values. I want to keep the video up there though because it led to our three requests for an IR related application. I have edited the TV application hype out of the video now, but obviously it still shows the TV. I wish people would see past the TV and just see it as the first demo where a weak IR source triggers a system that in principle only draws sub-100pA leakage. I understand that they don't. Just in the same way that some people don't see past the title and first three sentences of the buster video, and don't see that you actually like our chip.
We'll do better videos, but we'll need some patience as it takes time to create these demos, and it's not our main job.
So, instead we've put the broad areas up there (the "marketing 101"-style video has been edited following your feedback, see
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJBmHmeiMuUr6yraft6uCMv6L5qab3F0f).
So, please feel free to ask questions about the technology, or make suggestions. Or tell us to make better videos. That's fine and helpful. We'll do our best to learn, and do this right.
In return, could you please help us diffuse some of the aggressive commenting being made on YouTube by your followers? Imagine if your kids were getting this sort of abuse by people who can't see past the slagging off of our marketing hype. My guys have one desire, and that is to create something useful. They work overtime, and are on low UK public sector wages, they really deserve a bit of praise for what they've achieved. And they would find it much more gratifying it if came from you guys than me!