[2021] Single-Channel Energy Harvesting Power Converter for Heterogenous Sources

There are several modalities of energy harvesting and each one of them is more suitable for a specific type of environment. For instance, outdoor applications or wearables might benefit from the use of PV panels, warehouse tracking might employ RF energy harvesters, and biomedical implants might use piezoelectric harvesters or wireless power transfer to charge their batteries.

Currently, power converters are designed from scratch for each of these applications, but, from an economic standpoint, this is very expensive and time-consuming. To tackle this problem, power converters with multiple input channels, on which heterogeneous sources can be connected, have been published in the literature. However, the simultaneous use of several harvesters is not a popular option due to the large size of the final product and its increased BOM cost. Therefore, a single IC that can harvest from any of these energy sources would be the most valuable solution.

Assignment

Efforts on creating the multi-source power converter have been started by a previous master student. The goal of this project is to improve existing piezo-electric harvesting efficiency and, at the same, reduce the input voltage range below 100mV. The target input voltage ranges from 100 mV to 5 V, the input frequency ranges from DC to a few MHz, and the input power ranges from 10 μW to 100 mW.

Requirements

You are an MSc student in Electrical Engineering, in the Microelectronics track, and in the Analog or Biomedical Electronics profile. You have received at least a 7.5 for Analog Integrated Circuit Design (ET4252). Preferably you have also taken Introduction to power conversion technology (ET4382).

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Last modified: 2022-05-03