Engineers in the US have invented a new ant-sized radio that’s so energy efficient, it gathers all the power it needs from harvesting radio waves.

If, like us, you’re wading through a sea of wires and cables and battery packs, this new invention should make you very happy. Researchers at the University of Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley in the US have invented a radio the size of an ant. And the best part? It doesn’t need an external power source to function.

These minuscule silicon chips are powered through the harvesting of radio signals, and have been designed not for your smartphone or tablet, but for a brand new wave of electronics that will bring the capability of the Internet into everyday objects at home. So think smart lightbulbs, smart coffee makers and smart fridges, all communicating wirelessly with each other to make decisions to suit you, with minimal human intervention to get them working.

The key to making these chips so small, says Dalmeet Singh Chawla at Science, is scaling down every component. “The antenna, for example, is one-tenth the size of a Wi-Fi antenna – and yet, it runs at a fast speed of 24 billion cycles per second,” he says.

“The advantage of moving to this kind of architecture is that we can have the scalability that we want, we can scale the number of radios to thousands in a very dense environment,” says Amin Arbabian, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in the video below. “Because there’s no battery connected, there’s essentially no lifetime associated with these devices, as long as the signal’s coming in, they can recover the power, communicate and communicate back, and the cost is extremely low, because we’re talking about a few millimetres of silicon chip, which is a few cents to manufacture on a large scale.”

We can’t wait to move into our new smart homes.