An Ultra-Low-Power Electrostatic Energy Harvester Interface
This paper presents an ultra-low-power (1 μW-to-1 mW) and high voltage (5 V-to-60 V input voltage) inductive DC-DC converter to efficiently interface electrostatic energy harvesters. The chip is fully autonomous and includes start-up, shunt regulation, an
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An Ultra-Low-Power Electrostatic Energy Harvester Interface Stefano Stanzione, Chris van Liempd, and Chris van Hoof
18.1 Introduction Solid-state electronics develop enormously every year, thanks not only to circuit design innovation, but also to the development of better technologies. All this allows to constantly reduce power consumption of electronic systems, while keeping the other performance metrics almost unchanged. In this scenario, energy harvesting is becoming more and more interesting as it allows to reduce the cost of an application by avoiding a periodic replacement of the batteries or by reducing their size, or even allowing the implementation of battery-less systems. There are many environmental energy sources that can be exploited for these purposes (e.g. light, temperature gradient, mechanical vibrations, electromagnetic). The choice of the best source of energy clearly depends on the application. Usually the most abundant form of energy is chosen, even if there are exceptions due to system size and shape. The focus of this chapter is in the field of industrial machines and vehicle monitoring, in which the sensing electronic systems are positioned usually in inaccessible places (the moving parts), where the cabling can be expensive or almost impossible. The most abundant form of energy in the moving parts of machines is clearly mechanical and so vibrational harvesters are chosen in these systems. There are many types of vibrational harvesters: piezoelectric, electrostatic, magnetic. This chapter will focus on the interfacing of electrostatic harvesters. Basically, these devices are charged capacitors with one plate fixed (or just connected to a bigger
S. Stanzione () • C. van Liempd Holst Centre/imec, Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] C. van Hoof Holst Centre/imec, Eindhoven, The Netherlands KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 A. Baschirotto et al. (eds.), Wideband Continuous-time ˙ ADCs, Automotive Electronics, and Power Management, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41670-0_18
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inertial mass) and the other moving because of the environmental accelerations. In [1], a circuit capable to both bias the variable capacitor and extract power from its movement is proposed. A drawback of this design is that part of the power extracted is used for the polarization of the capacitor. Additionally, this design strategy limits the capacitor polarization voltages to the maximum voltage ratings of the chosen IC manufacturing technology, which most of the times is lower than the polarization voltage for the harvester itself. A solution for scavenging more efficiently energy from the environmental vibrations consists in building a partially isolated structure, in which the variable capacitor is pre-charged with a certain potential and then isolated from the outside world. In this case, the charged electrode is called electret and the harvesters fabricated in this way are denoted as electretbased electrostatic energy h
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