Single-Channel Heterogeneous-Source Energy Harvesting PMIC Design

This work proposes an energy harvesting platform that is able to convert power from both DC sources (photo-voltaic cells and TEGs) as well as piezo element sources. It does so only using a single input channel to which a single harvester can be connected. The proposed system is able to differentiate between the two source...

ENMOS: Energy Module for Self-Sustainable Wearable Sensors

This work focuses on addressing the fundamental limitation on the minimum cold start-up voltage that could be harvested from a thermoelectric element (TEG) for human-body wearable applications. For ultra-low DC voltages, the challenge translates to generating a timed-signal to amplify it up to a value that could be used to drive, say, a boost...

Energy harvesting on the human body: Hybrid charge pump design for cold start compatibility and high efficiency harvesting with minimal footprint

This work proposes a new charge pump design suitable for energy harvesting on small human wearable devices. By using only one system for both cold start and high efficiency harvesting, the required silicon area is heavily reduced. The most fitting energy transducer is determined to be a photovoltaic cell, based on aspects of voltage, power and...

An On-Chip Self-Characterization of a Digital-to-Time Converter by Embedding it in a First-Order ΔΣ Loop

To characterize an on-chip programmable delay in a low-cost and high-resolution manner, a built-in self-test based on a first-order ΔΣ time-to-digital converter with self-calibration is proposed and implemented in TSMC 28-nm CMOS. The system is self-contained, and only one digital clock is needed for the measurements. A...