Abstract-This paper proposes, for the first time, an automated energy harvester design flow which is based on a single HDL software platform that can be used to model, simulate, configure and optimise energy harvester systems. A demonstrator prototype incorporating an electromagnetic mechanical-vibrationbased micro-generator and a limited number of library models has been developed and a design case study has been carried out. Experimental measurements have validated the simulation results which show that the outcome from the design flow can improve the energy harvesting efficiency by 75%.

Abstract-In an energy harvester powered wireless sensor node, the energy harvester is often the only energy source, therefore it is crucial to configure the microcontroller and the sensor node so that the harvested energy is used efficiently. This paper presents a response surface model (RSM) based design space exploration and optimisation of a complete wireless sensor node system. In our work the power consumption models of the microcontroller and the sensor node are defined based on their digital operations so that the parameters of the digital algorithms can be optimised to achieve the best energy efficiency. In the proposed technique, SystemC-A is used to model the system's analogue components as well as the digital control algorithms implemented in the microcontroller and the sensor node. A series of simulations are carried out and a response surface model is constructed from the simulation results. The RSM is then optimised using MATLAB's optimisation toolbox and the results show that the optimised system configuration can double the total number of wireless transmissions with fixed amount of harvested energy. The great improvement in the system performance validates the efficiency of our technique.

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