ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
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
An efficient solar energy harvester for wireless sensor nodes
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
Ultra-low-power biopotential interfaces and their applications in wearable and implantable systems
Microelectronics Journal
Analysis and design of ultra low power thermoelectric energy harvesting systems
Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Micro-scale energy harvesting: a system design perspective
Proceedings of the 2010 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Energy harvesting has emerged as a feasible and attractive option to improve battery lifetime in micro-scale electronic systems such as biomedical implants and wireless sensor nodes. A key challenge in designing micro-scale energy harvesting systems is that miniature energy transducers (e.g., photovoltaic cells, thermo-electric generators, and fuel cells) output very low voltages (0--0.4V). Therefore, a fully on-chip power converter (usually based on a charge pump) is used to boost the output voltage of the energy transducer and transfer charge into an energy buffer for storage. However, the charge transfer capability of widely used linear charge pump based power converters degrades when used with ultra-low voltage energy transducers. This paper presents the design of a new tree topology charge pump that has a reduced charge sharing time, leading to an improved charge transfer capability. The proposed design has been implemented using 65nm technology and circuit simulations demonstrate that the proposed design results in an increase of up to 30% in harvested power compared to existing linear charge pumps.