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A.L. Rodrigues Mansano

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12 records found

Radio frequency energy harvesting and low power data transmission for autonomous wireless sensor nodes

Doctoral thesis - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the new technology to drive the semiconductor industry, significant research efforts have been made to develop new circuit and system techniques for autonomous/very low-power operation of wireless sensor nodes. Very low-power consumption of sensors is key to increase battery lifetime or allow for battery-less (autonomous) operation of sensors, which contributes to preventing or reducing the high maintenance costs of battery supplied sensors and reduce the amount of discarded batteries. This thesis, entitled Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting and Low Power Data Transmission for Autonomous Wireless Sensor Nodes, presents very low-power consumption circuit and system techniques combined with energy harvesting that allow the creation of autonomous wireless sensor nodes. This work focuses on three main challenges: 1) how to improve energy harvesting efficiency, 2) how to minimize power consumption of data transmission and 3) how to combine low-power techniques and energy harvesting in a system. These challenges are addressed in this thesis with on-PCB and Integrated Circuits (IC) solutions. The efficiency of radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting is improved by proposing a new topology of a charge-pump rectifier. The proposed topology uses a voltage boosting network to compensate for the voltage drop in the transistors. The new topology is presented and analyzed. Simulation results are compared to the analytical analysis and measurement results of the circuit that has been fabricated in a 0.18um CMOS technology and operates at 13.53 MHz. Although the efficiency of RF energy harvesting is improved using the above technique, at the same time, low power techniques in data transmission should be developed to save energy. Pulse width modulation and impulse transmission techniques to minimize power consumption have been developed and are presented in this thesis. The developed pulse modulation circuitry has been fabricated in 0.18um CMOS technology as part of a System on Chip (SoC). The new impulse transmitter topology for low-voltage low-power operation has been fabricated on PCB with micro-wave discrete components. Theoretical analysis, simulations and measurements results are shown to prove the impulse transmitter concept. The circuits developed are integrated in a SoC with energy harvesting to prove the concept of autonomous wireless sensor nodes. Two sensor nodes have been designed and measured: one for autonomous temperature monitoring and the second for autonomous ECG monitoring. Both designs operate from wireless power without the use of batteries. Finally, the work developed in this thesis is summarized and future research possibilities are discussed.@en

An Autonomous Wireless Sensor Node With Asynchronous ECG Monitoring in 0.18 μ m CMOS

Journal article - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, Y. Li, S. Bagga, W.A. Serdijn

The design of a 13.56 MHz/402 MHz autonomous wireless sensor node with asynchronous ECG monitoring for near field communication is presented. The sensor node consists of an RF energy harvester (RFEH), a power management unit, an ECG readout, a data encoder and an RF backscatterin ...

An Autonomous Wireless Sensor Node With Asynchronous ECG Monitoring in 0.18 μ m CMOS

Journal article - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, Y. Li, S. Bagga, W.A. Serdijn

Introduction to RF Energy Harvesting

Book chapter - W.A. Serdijn, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, M. Stoopman

A frequency-selective broadband low-noise amplifier with double-loop transformer feedback

Journal article - S. Bagga, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, W.A. Serdijn, J..R.. Long, Koen van Hartingsveldt, K Philips

A frequency-selective broadband low-noise amplifier with double-loop transformer feedback

Journal article - S. Bagga, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, W.A. Serdijn, J..R.. Long, Koen van Hartingsveldt, K Philips

An ECG recording front-end with continuous-time level-crossing sampling

Journal article - Y. Li, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, Y. Yuan, D. Zhao, W.A. Serdijn

An asynchronous event-driven data transmitter for wireless ECG sensor nodes

Conference paper - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, Y. Li, S. Bagga, W.A. Serdijn

A high efficiency orthogonally switching passive charge pump rectifier for energy harvesters

Journal article - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, S. Bagga, W.A. Serdijn

A 13.56/402 MHz autonomous wireless sensor node with -18.2 dBm sensitivity and temperature monitoring in 0.18 ¿m CMOS

Conference paper - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, S. Bagga, W.A. Serdijn

A frequency-selective nested dual-loop broadband low-noise amplifier in 90 nm CMOS

Conference paper - S. Bagga, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, W.A. Serdijn, J..R.. Long, K Philips, JJ Pekarik

Autonomous wireless sensor for ECG monitoring

Abstract - A.L. Rodrigues Mansano, Y. Li, W.A. Serdijn

Contributed

2 records found

Energy harvesting on the human body

Hybrid charge pump design for cold start compatibility and high efficiency harvesting with minimal footprint

Master thesis - L. van Wietmarschen, W.A. Serdijn, M. Babaie, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano

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 size. Both indoor and outdoor lighting conditions are suitable. The literature on fully integrated voltage boosting with special attention to cold start shows that the capacitive charge pump is the best solution for high efficiency, low power and small size voltage boosting. For cold start applications, a Dickson charge pump with dynamic charge transfer switches is the best solution. For achieving high efficiency conversion, theMakowski charge pump is the best. The proposed design combines the advantages of the Dickson charge pump for cold start and the high efficiency aspects of aMakowski charge pump for normal operation in one system with minimal silicon area. Using capacitor splitting, the conversion ratio of the cold start charge pump can be orthogonally chosen from the conversion ratio of normal operation. Dynamic charge transfer switches are used for the cold start charge pump to increase the performance. An implementation of the proposed design is made in Cadence Virtuoso and is tested for cold start capability and efficiency across five process corners and three temperatures. The results prove that the proposed design can achieve high efficiency energy harvesting that is on average 5% below the efficiency of a normal Makowski charge pump. Cold start was achieved from 100mV that is boosted to a battery voltage of 1.8 V within the micro-watt power range. With these results, the proposed charge pump is suitable for photovoltaic energy harvesting in small devices. The required silicon area is reduced by 50%, compared to systems where cold start and high efficiency harvesting are provided by separate systems. The proposed design is made into a lay-out, which is currently being tested and will be manufactured in the coming months.

ENMOS: Energy Module for Self-Sustainable Wearable Sensors

Master thesis - A.K. Parag, W.A. Serdijn, P.J. French, Q. Fan, A. Urso, A.L. Rodrigues Mansano

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 converter which can then start-up the entire energy module. Contemporary works have, thus, strived to accomplish this using a charge-pump-based or a transformer-based approach, which in turn imposes a limit on the minimum TEG voltage that can be harvested. The solution this work proposes is to decouple the Cold Start-up system from the TEG altogether and instead, use a piezoelectric element (PEH). This element being capable of producing a well-timed (AC) signal for free, based on human body vibrations, can potentially drive a boost converter. To this end, an integrated circuit (IC) is designed that can utilize the voltage from the PEH, amplifying it up to generate a well-controlled signal that could operate the boost converter. At the heart of this IC, is a self-reconfigurable charge pump that arranges its stages in different boosting ratios (without any complex logic or DSP) based on the input voltage, to allow for a maximum harvested power. The proposed self-reconfigurable architecture can potentially lead the charge pump to be load-variation-resistant. It achieves this by providing an almost constant voltage while increasing the power for higher load demands, at the same time maintaining a constant efficiency. Thus, the fully on-chip implementation in TSMC 0.18 um CMOS, can cold start-up the system from 25 mV of thermoelectric voltage to deliver an output voltage of 1 V at 56.5 % converter efficiency, consuming only 240.5 pW of dynamic power (simulation). The minimum Cold Start-up voltage and dynamic power were found to be 18 mV (ΔT = 0.1 K) and 231.6 pW respectively, to supply 1 V at 44 % converter efficiency. Moreover, in order to prove that the fundamental limitation on the Cold Start-up voltage has been addressed successfully, the IC was also simulated to check whether it can further be lowered. In this case, by providing a piezoelectric excitation voltage 73.3 mVRMS higher, the Cold Start-up voltage was found to be reduced to 15 mV to supply a constant 1 V at the load. It was also found that increasing the inductor value in this case, can also allow the energy module to support even lower Cold Start-up voltages.