MEMS specialist Vesper has taken the wraps off of its VM1010, an audio sensor that harvests sound energy to allow it to wake a system from a fully powered-down mode. It promises to massively extend the battery life of edge-network devices in these sorts of IoT applications. Currently, the vast majority of hardware designs that support audio-sensing require the device to be always listening for the sounds it is meant to be hunting. This means that the system is constantly drawing power from its battery reserves, and then firing up into its broadcast mode once it has detected the appropriate sound, to issue its alert. The new VM1010 claims to draw only 3 µA of current when in listening mode,…