Bringing Robustness and Power Efficiency to Autonomous Energy Harvesting Microsystems

An innovative and efficient Energy Harvesting Platform architecture for autonomous microsystems

“…More details about the controller and the control algorithm can be found in [5]. The latter paper involves a basic supply structure, whose advanced version is presented in the next section.…”

“…Our proposal is a fully reconfigurable and robust platform which includes various energy harvesters, sensor interfaces, and a dedicated asynchronous digital controller. A separated paper gives an overview of the microsystem with particular emphasis on the asynchronous digital controller [5]. In this paper, we propose an innovative and efficient Energy Harvesting Platform (EHP) which combines a fully adaptive power supply architecture and efficient power management principles.…”

Event-driven asynchronous voltage monitoring in energy harvesting platforms

“…few dozens of microwatts), energy is stored either in capacitors for short term usage or in a battery for long term usage. The architecture of [4] proposed a direct power path between energy harvesters and power loads as soon as a small amount of energy is available. The classical indirect power path consists in systematically charging the battery and discharging it afterwards.…”

“…In order to decrease the total microsystem power consumption, we propose to use a fully asynchronous harvesting platform and its dedicated power management [4]. The idea is to wake-up the system only on energy or data events depending on environmental conditions or applicative constraints.…”

“…Those two solutions are based on basic power path architecture: the harvester is directly connected to charge the battery which itself supplies the circuit. In order to improve the global power efficiency, a dual power path is proposed in [4] where harvesters can directly supply the circuit before charging the battery.…”