[2024] Wide Operational Range Multi-source Energy Harvesting Integrated Circuits

Energy harvesting is a promising technique to power the future Internet-of-Things (IoT), as well as future wearable personal electronics and biomedical health devices. This new technique provides a sustainable solution to fundamentally change the conventional power solutions to move the world towards a sustainable future. Many successful devices and systems have recently been developed to show their profound impact on the industry; however, there are still some challenges to be addressed before this technique is massively implemented everywhere in our daily life.

Current energy harvesting systems are mostly focused on one single energy source, e.g. solar energy, vibration energy, thermoelectric energy, or RF energy. However, the reality is that all these types of energy exist everywhere on the earth. The only difference is that they have different power levels at different places. There are a few recent research works focusing on dual-input energy harvesting systems by harvesting two types of energy at the same time[1][2]. However, existing systems simply put two energy harvesting systems together by sharing a few blocks without exploring dynamic collaborations amongst the employed harvesters.

In this project, we are going develop a new energy harvesting system that does not only simply integrate multiple energy sources, but also utilizes different physical characteristics of transducers to fundamentally improve the performance at various aspects, including, lower cold-start conditions, faster maximum power point tracking (MPPT), higher overall energy efficiency and greater output power. We will aim to integrate the proposed energy harvesting system with various wireless sensor modules for system-level integrations and testing.

[1] S. C. Chandrarathna and J. W. Lee, "A 580 nW Dual-Input Energy Harvester IC Using Multi-Task MPPT and a Current Boost Converter for Heterogeneous Source Combining," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, vol. 67, no. 12, pp. 5650-5663, 2020.

[2] K. Yoon, S. Hong, and G. Cho, "Double Pile-Up Resonance Energy Harvesting Circuit for Piezoelectric and Thermoelectric Materials," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 1049-1060, 2018.

Assignment

1. Literature review of multi-source energy harvesting topologies and associated power management circuits.
2. Design and tape out a highly efficient CMOS circuit for the proposed multi-source energy harvesting system. 

Requirements

You should be familiar with analog IC design and Cadence environment. If you are interested, please the following documents to Sijun Du at email: Sijun.Du@tudelft.nl

• Your up-to-date CV
• BSc transcripts
• MSc grades (obtained to date)

Contact

Last modified: 2024-02-07