Ultra-low power energy harvesting and power management circuits for IoT applications

Abstract

Recent progress in integrated circuits (IC) technology and design techniques, especially in ultra-low power circuits domain, has led a rapid growth of fully integrated and portable electronics within internet of things (IoT) smart nodes and wearable sensors system on chip (SoC). IoT applications including biomedical sensors, body area networks and wireless sensors, have taken advantage of such a progress. However, with the increase of people needs, numerous blocks must be integrated within the IoT SoC. Hence, a compact, efficient and self-sustained power management circuit (PMC) with a long life-time design becomes crucial for IoT SoC. Thus, energy scavengers, such as photovoltaic cells (PV), thermos-electric generators (TEG) and electro-static harvesters, become an attractive solution to power the PMC, for self-sustaining and