Design and power management of energy harvesting embedded systems
Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
ISLPED '07 Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Human Body Energy Harvesting Thermogenerator for Sensing Applications
SENSORCOMM '07 Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Efficient power conversion for ultra low voltage micro scale energy transducers
Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
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Thermal energy harvesting using micro-scale thermoelectric generators is a promising approach to alleviate the power supply challenge in ultra low power systems. In thermal energy harvesting systems, energy is extracted from the transducer using an interface circuitry, which plays a key role in the determining the energy extraction efficiency. This paper presents techniques for the systematic modeling, analysis, and design of interface circuitry used in micro-scale thermoelectric energy harvesting systems. We characterize the electrical behavior of a micro-scale thermoelectric transducer connected to a step-up charge pump based power converter and model the relationship between the transducer output voltage and the charge pump switching frequency. We model various power loss components inside the interface circuitry and present an analytical design methodology that estimates optimal parameter values for the interface circuitry. These parameter values lead to maximum net output power being delivered to the energy buffer. We have implemented various interface circuitries using IBM 65nm technology to verify our proposed models and methodology. Circuit simulation results show that the proposed methodology accurately estimates the maximum power point voltage of the system with an error of 3%.