Title
Non-volatile logic SoC with software-hardware co-design and integrated supply supervisor for energy harvesting applications
Abstract
In a world where electronics is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the challenge of powering devices is progressively becoming more difficult. Often it is impractical to replace batteries or line power numerous devices. Energy harvesting is an attractive alternative but has the inherent disadvantage of frequent power loss. For processing systems like microcontrollers (MCUs) power restoration usually requires a boot up sequence before the target application can start. Boot up negatively impacts the power budget and response time of a MCU. This paper describes how non-volatile memory can be used in an efficient manner to preserve the system state of a MCU. As a result, an application can continue operating from where it left off before the power loss, enabling compute through power loss. In contrast to previously published work, this work is a fully integrated SoC that automatically responds to an impending power loss. The MCU features an integrated supply supervisor with fail safe operation. A novel software synchronized state back-up process is also introduced, which drastically reduces the number of flops that need to be saved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/MWSCAS.2017.8053066
Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems Conference Proceedings
Keywords
Field
DocType
SoC,Non-Volatile Logic,Energy Harvesting
Supervisor,Power budget,Computer science,Response time,Energy harvesting,Electronic engineering,Software,Fail-safe,Electronics,Microcontroller,Computer hardware,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1548-3746
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael Zwerg1393.51
Sudhanshu Khanna2558.45
Steven Bartling3173.22