Energy-Autonomous MCU Operating in sub-VT Regime with Tightly-Integrated Energy-Harvester : A SoC for IoT smart nodes containing a MCU with minimum-energy point of 2.9pJ/cycle and a harvester with output power range from sub-µW to 4.32mW
- 1 July 2019
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
We describe a SoC achieving zero-net-energy operation by using energy harvesting and sub-threshold design. It consists of a microcontroller for data acquisition, data processing, and communication and an energy harvester unit enabling energy-autonomous operation. The microcontroller built with latch-based design achieves robust operation in a wide frequency range from 5 kHz to 40 MHz with a minimum energy point of 2.9 pJ/cycle @ 0.375V and 21 MHz. With this SoC, the battery lifetime is extended indefinitely thanks to the energy harvesting unit, which is capable to handle output power range from sub-µW to 4.32 mW with peak conversion efficiency of 65%. The tight integration of MCU and harvester enables the development of customized firmware algorithms for energy optimized operation with very diverse energy sources.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- A 595pW 14pJ/Cycle microcontroller with dual-mode standard cells and self-startup for battery-indifferent distributed sensingPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2018
- A Differential Transmission Gate Design Flow for Minimum Energy Sub-10-pJ/Cycle ARM Cortex-M0 MCUsIEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2017
- An Autonomous Energy Harvesting Power Management Unit With Digital Regulation for IoT ApplicationsIEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2016
- 8.1 An 80nW retention 11.7pJ/cycle active subthreshold ARM Cortex-M0+ subsystem in 65nm CMOS for WSN applicationsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2015
- 23.3 A 3nW fully integrated energy harvester based on self-oscillating switched-capacitor DC-DC converterPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2014