Title
A Generic Power Management Circuit for Energy Harvesters With Shared Components Between the MPPT and Regulator
Abstract
This paper presents a novel power management circuit (PMC) for harvesting the energy from the ambient. The proposed PMC comprises an energy harvester, a startup, a dc–dc boost converter, and a dc–dc buck converter. The PMC is capable of working with various low-power energy harvesters and can track the maximum power point after every 4.5 s. To achieve the maximum power point tracking (MPPT), an open-circuit-voltage-based method is used to transfer the maximum power from the energy harvester to the power optimized boost converter. The proposed MPPT scheme works for a wide range of equivalent source resistance of the energy harvester in the range of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20~\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> –1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{M}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> . An auxiliary energy harvester is used for the startup to avoid any external supply. Regulated voltage across a load is provided by the buck converter which features sharing the switches and inductor with the boost converter. The complete circuit is designed, optimized, and simulated in 180-nm mixed-mode CMOS technology using three different types of energy harvesters, which are precisely characterized and modeled. Post-layout simulated results are presented for the input power ranging from 150 nW to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$500~\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for different values of source resistances ranging from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20~\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> to 1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{M}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> . For a source resistance of 100 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{k}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> , the efficiency of the boost converter is 39.91% and 89.91% at available power of 156 nW and 2.5 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , respectively. The buck converter is able to regulate the load voltage to 1 V across the load resistance ranging from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$100~\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> to 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{k}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> .
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TVLSI.2018.2885928
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Resistance,Radio frequency,Rectennas,Buck converters,Energy harvesting,Vibrations,Inductors
Boost converter,Topology,Computer science,Voltage,Maximum power point tracking,Inductor,Energy harvesting,Electronic engineering,CMOS,Maximum power principle,Buck converter
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
3
1063-8210
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.40
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gaurav Saini130.40
Maryam Shojaei Baghini28629.67