This book describes fully-integrated power management circuits for thermoelectric energy harvesting. Readers will learn about the applications, system design fundamentals, designs of building blocks, maximum power point tracking techniques, and design of battery chargers. The book covers the following key topics: 1) minimizing the cost of a thermoelectric generator (TEG) by considering the maximum open circuit voltage of TEG and the dependence of the power conversion efficiency of the converter on the input voltage, 2) controlling the input voltage of the converter system to ensure it remains higher than the minimum operating voltage, 3) designing a charge pump operating in the sub-threshold region, considering factors such as clock frequency, stage capacitor size, rectifying device size, and the number of stages, 4) implementing maximum power point tracking techniques with a small circuit area, and 5) designing a fully integrated battery charger. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of these concepts and their practical applications. In addition, this book: Provides a concise introduction to fully-integrated power management circuits for thermoelectric energy harvesting Covers design of building blocks, system, battery charger, maximum power point tracking techniques and applications Enables readers to gain quickly comprehensive understanding of key concepts and their practical applications.

Abstract: Power Management is considered one of the hot topics nowadays, as it is already known that all integrated circuits need a stable supply with low noise, a constant voltage level across time, and the ability to supply large range of loads. Normal batteries do not provide those specifications. A new concept of energy management called energy harvesting is introduced here. Energy harvesting means collecting power from ambient resources like solar power, Radio Frequency (RF) power, energy from motion...etc. The Energy is collected by means of a transducer that directly converts this energy into electrical energy that can be managed by design to supply different loads. Harvested energy management is critical because normal batteries have to be replaced with energy harvesting modules with power management, in order to make integrated circuits fully autonomous; this leads to a decrease in maintenance costs and increases the life time. This work covers the design of an energy harvesting system focusing on micro-scale solar energy harvesting with power management. The target application of this study is a Wireless Sensor Node/Network (WSN) because its applications are very wide and power management in it is a big issue, as it is very hard to replace the battery of a WSN after deployment. The contribution of this work is mainly shown on two different scopes. The first scope is to propose a new tracking technique and to verify on the system level. The second scope is to propose a new optimized architecture for switched capacitor based power converters. At last, some future recommendations are proposed for this work to be more robust and reliable so that it can be transfered to the production phase. The proposed system design is based on the sub-threshold operation. This design approach decreases the amount of power consumed in the control circuit. It can efficiently harvest the maximum power possible from the photo-voltaic cell and transfer this power to the super-capacitor side with high efficiency. It shows a better performance compared to the literature work. The proposed architecture of the charge pump is more efficient in terms of power capability and knee frequency over the basic linear charge pump topology. Comparison with recent topologies are discussed and shows the robustness of the proposed technique.

This book discusses the design and implementation of energy harvesting systems targeting wearable devices. The authors describe in detail the different energy harvesting sources that can be utilized for powering low-power devices in general, focusing on the best candidates for wearable applications. Coverage also includes state-of-the-art interface circuits, which can be used to accept energy from harvesters and deliver it to a device in the most efficient way. Finally, the authors present power management circuits for using multiple energy harvesting sources at the same time to power devices and to enhance efficiency of the system.

In this book, a global team of experts from academia, research institutes and industry presents their vision on how new nano-chip architectures will enable the performance and energy efficiency needed for AI-driven advancements in autonomous mobility, healthcare, and man-machine cooperation. Recent reviews of the status quo, as presented in CHIPS 2020 (Springer), have prompted the need for an urgent reassessment of opportunities in nanoelectronic information technology. As such, this book explores the foundations of a new era in nanoelectronics that will drive progress in intelligent chip systems for energy-efficient information technology, on-chip deep learning for data analytics, and quantum computing. Given its scope, this book provides a timely compendium that hopes to inspire and shape the future of nanoelectronics in the decades to come.

This book highlights the current and recent state-of-the-art developments in energy harvesting systems for health supervising applications. It explores the exciting potential of energy harvesting as a crosscutting field of research to intersect with other areas to envisage new products, solutions, and applications. Among all these new opportunities for synergy, there is a research area that fully matches the features offered by energy harvesting with its power supply's main needs- health supervising (HS), which consists of monitoring the health or operating conditions of anything, such as structures, buildings, public health, environment, etc. The book covers the hand in hand evolution towards a new paradigm: truly self-powered devices based on a single transducer acting as a sensor and as power source simultaneously and efficiently. This evolution is illustrated by the concept and implementation of novel state-of-the-art architecture for self-powered energy harvesting systems for applications that range from structural health monitoring to point-of-care medical devices.

The release of this second volume of CHIPS 2020 coincides with the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, a critical year marked by the end of the nanometer roadmap and by a significantly reduced annual rise in chip performance. At the same time, we are witnessing a data explosion in the Internet, which is consuming 40% more electrical power every year, leading to fears of a major blackout of the Internet by 2020. The messages of the first CHIPS 2020, published in 2012, concerned the realization of quantum steps for improving the energy efficiency of all chip functions. With this second volume, we review these messages and amplify upon the most promising directions: ultra-low-voltage electronics, nanoscale monolithic 3D integration, relevant-data, brain- and human-vision-inspired processing, and energy harvesting for chip autonomy. The team of authors, enlarged by more world leaders in low-power, monolithic 3D, video, and Silicon brains, presents new vistas in nanoelectronics, promising Moore-like exponential growth sustainable through to the 2030s.

This book enables readers to gain a deep understanding of the challenges related to the design of a charge pump (CP). Analysis, modeling, design strategies and topologies are treated in detail. Novel and high-performance CP topologies and related design are organized in a coherent manner, with particular care devoted to ultra-low power and energy harvesting applications. The authors provide basic theoretical foundations as needed, in order to set the stage for readers’ comprehension of analyses and results. Exhaustive methodologies are presented and analytical derivations are included, enabling readers to gain insight on the main dependencies among the relevant circuit parameters. Although the material is presented in a formal and theoretical manner, emphasis is on the design perspective, using many practical examples and measured results.