No abstract

No abstract

Piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEHs) are widely used to convert energy from a piezoelectric transducer into a stable DC form, which enables low-power IoT devices to have an unlimited operating life without using batteries. Under weak excitation conditions, however, the power-extraction efficiency of conventional PEHs is too low to provide power even to low-power IoT devices that requires low operation voltages less than 2 V. This paper proposes an asymmetric synchronous electric charge extraction (ASECE) scheme that improves the extraction efficiency of PEHs at low output voltages under weak excitation. The proposed ASECE is implemented using 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The figure-ofmerits (FOMs) of the proposed ASECE while operating under 2 V of output voltage are 7.14 and 6.24 at weak and strong excitations, respectively. The maximum FOM for various different excitation levels is observed to be as high as 7.7. The proposed ASECE is superior to prior art with respect to FOM, by at least 1.15×, 1.63×, and 2.21× under 2 V, 1 V, and 0.5 V outputs, respectively, under strong excitation.

Direct AC LED drivers have advantages over conventional LED drivers in size and cost because of no need for bulky and expensive inductive components. However, none of conventional direct AC LED drivers researched so far support triode AC switch (TRIAC) compatibility at low percent flicker. This paper achieves both TRIAC dimmer compatibility and low percent flicker by correlating a phase-cut ratio to luminance and using always-on multi-arrays, respectively, without the need of a dedicated IC. The proposed LED driver consists of a phase-cut/DC converter, a switch controller, a current regulator, and three LED arrays. The experimental results based on commercial 15W LEDs show that the percent flicker of 18.6% @ 120 Hz is achieved with an efficiency of 84.7% and a power factor of 97.3% @ 120 V.

In an IR proximity-based motion gesture sensor (MGS) mainly composed of an IR LED and photodiodes (PDs), the IR LED is the most power-hungry component. For reducing its power, both the size and the field-of-view (FOV) of each PD can be increased instead. However, it cannot be adapted to conventional MGSs due to the geometrical limitation of their optical structures. In this paper, the optical structure of the proposed MGS with a partially open cavity package allows for power reduction by at least 70.9% compared with conventional MGSs. Optical simulation and test results validate the theoretical analysis presented.