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An efficient energy harvesting circuit for batteryless IoT devices

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Abstract

A new energy harvesting circuit for battery-less IoT beacon tags is developed herein to maximize power conversion efficiency as well as high throughput power with a wide input–output range. This design energy harvest (EH) circuit incorporates a charge pump (CP) with shoot-through current suppression, a body selector circuit, a maximum power point tracking circuit (MPPT), a timing control circuit, a hysteresis control circuit and a low dropout regulator. Also in this MPPT circuit is a gated clock tuned in a self-adaptive fashion to match the input impedance of the EH circuit to the output impedance of the photovoltaic (PV) panel, thus achieving successfully maximum power point. The circuit is implemented in an integrated chip in an area of 1.2 mm2 via the TSMC 0.18 process. Experiments on the chip are conducted and the results show that the input voltage range is allowed from 0.55 to 1.7 V to effectively harvest the solar power from a flexible dye-sensitized solar cell. The achieved peak power conversion efficiency (PCE) is 77% at the input power of 52 μW. For a wide range of lighting luminance (300–1300 lx,) the achieved average PCE is more than 70%. The achieved wide input–output range and the maximum throughput power of 200 μW is much larger than others reported, while the 77% of PCE is close to that best power conversion efficiency reported.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan grant No. MOST 106-2634-F-009-001 -CC2, MOST 107-2221-E-009 -166 -MY2, MOST 107-2218-E-009 -006 -, MOST107-3017-F009-003, MOST 107-2622-E-009 -025 -CC2, MOST 108-2823-8-009 -002 -, and MOST 108-2623-E-009 -004 –D. It was also supported in part by the Novel Bioengineering and Technological Approaches to Solve Two Major Health Problems in Taiwan sponsored by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology Academic Excellence Program under Grant Number: MOST 108-2633-B-009-001. This work was financially supported by the “Center for Intelligent Drug Systems and Smart Bio-devices (IDS2B)” from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan

    Ching-Cheng Yang, Rajeev Pandey, Tse-Yi Tu, Yuan-Po Cheng & Paul C.-P. Chao

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  1. Ching-Cheng Yang
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  2. Rajeev Pandey
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  3. Tse-Yi Tu
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  4. Yuan-Po Cheng
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  5. Paul C.-P. Chao
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Correspondence to Paul C.-P. Chao.

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Yang, CC., Pandey, R., Tu, TY. et al. An efficient energy harvesting circuit for batteryless IoT devices. Microsyst Technol 26, 195–207 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-019-04544-7

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