A Charge-Recycling Scheme and Ultra Low Voltage Self-Startup Charge Pump for Highly Energy Efficient Mixed Signal Systems-On-A-Chip

The advent of battery operated sensor-based electronic systems has provided a pressing need to design energy-efficient, ultra-low power integrated circuits as a means to improve the battery lifetime. This dissertation describes a scheme to lower the power requirement of a digital circuit through the use of charge-recycling and dynamic supply-voltage scaling techniques. The novel charge-recycling scheme proposed in this research demonstrates the feasibility of operating digital circuits using the charge scavenged from the leakage and dynamic load currents inherent to digital design. The proposed scheme efficiently gathers the “ground-bound” charge into storage capacitor banks. This reclaimed charge is then subsequently recycled to power the source digital circuit. The charge-recycling methodology has been implemented on a 12-bit Gray-code counter operating at frequencies of less than 50 MHz. The circuit has been designed in a 90-nm process and measurement results reveal more than 41% reduction in the average energy consumption of the counter. The total energy savings including the power consumed for the generation of control signals aggregates to an average of 23%. The proposed methodology can be applied to an existing digital path without any design change to the circuit but with only small loss to the performance. Potential applications of this scheme are described, specifically in wide-temperature dynamic power reduction and as a source for energy harvesters. The second part of this dissertation deals with the design and development of a self-starting, ultra-low voltage, switched-capacitor (SC) DC-DC converter that is essential to an energy harvesting system. The proposed charge-pump based SC-converter operates from 125-mV input and thus enables battery-less operation in ultra-low voltage energy harvesters. The charge pump does not require any external components or expensive post-fabrication processing to enable low-voltage operation. This design has been implemented in a 130-nm CMOS process. While the proposed charge pump provides significant efficiency enhancement in energy harvesters, it can also be incorporated within charge recycling systems to facilitate adaptable charge-recycling levels. In total, this dissertation provides key components needed for highly energy-efficient mixed signal systems-on-a-chip

Power Management ICs for Internet of Things, Energy Harvesting and Biomedical Devices

This dissertation focuses on the power management unit (PMU) and integrated circuits (ICs) for the internet of things (IoT), energy harvesting and biomedical devices. Three monolithic power harvesting methods are studied for different challenges of smart nodes of IoT networks. Firstly, we propose that an impedance tuning approach is implemented with a capacitor value modulation to eliminate the quiescent power consumption. Secondly, we develop a hill-climbing MPPT mechanism that reuses and processes the information of the hysteresis controller in the time-domain and is free of power hungry analog circuits. Furthermore, the typical power-performance tradeoff of the hysteresis controller is solved by a self-triggered one-shot mechanism. Thus, the output regulation achieves high-performance and yet low-power operations as low as 12 µW. Thirdly, we introduce a reconfigurable charge pump to provide the hybrid conversion ratios (CRs) as 1⅓× up to 8× for minimizing the charge redistribution loss. The reconfigurable feature also dynamically tunes to maximum power point tracking (MPPT) with the frequency modulation, resulting in a two-dimensional MPPT. Therefore, the voltage conversion efficiency (VCE) and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) are enhanced and flattened across a wide harvesting range as 0.45 to 3 V. In a conclusion, we successfully develop an energy harvesting method for the IoT smart nodes with lower cost, smaller size, higher conversion efficiency, and better applicability. For the biomedical devices, this dissertation presents a novel cost-effective automatic resonance tracking method with maximum power transfer (MPT) for piezoelectric transducers (PT). The proposed tracking method is based on a band-pass filter (BPF) oscillator, exploiting the PT’s intrinsic resonance point through a sensing bridge. It guarantees automatic resonance tracking and maximum electrical power converted into mechanical motion regardless of process variations and environmental interferences. Thus, the proposed BPF oscillator-based scheme was designed for an ultrasonic vessel sealing and dissecting (UVSD) system. The sealing and dissecting functions were verified experimentally in chicken tissue and glycerin. Furthermore, a combined sensing scheme circuit allows multiple surgical tissue debulking, vessel sealer and dissector (VSD) technologies to operate from the same sensing scheme board. Its advantage is that a single driver controller could be used for both systems simplifying the complexity and design cost. In a conclusion, we successfully develop an ultrasonic scalpel to replace the other electrosurgical counterparts and the conventional scalpels with lower cost and better functionality

Design of low-voltage integrated step-up oscillators with microtransformers for energy harvesting applications

This paper describes the modeling of startup circuits in battery-less micropower energy harvesting systems and investigates the use of bond wire micromagnetics. The analysis focuses on step-up Meissner oscillators based on magnetic core transformers operating with input voltages down to ≈100 mV, e.g. from thermoelectric generators. As a key point, this paper examines the effect of core losses and leakage inductances on the startup requirements obtained with the classical Barkhausen criterion, and demonstrates the minimum transconductance for oscillations to occur. For validation purposes, a step-up oscillator IC is fabricated in a STMicroelectronics 0.32 μm technology, and connected to two bond-wire microtransformers, respectively, with a 1:38 MnZn ferrite core and with a 1:52 ferromagnetic low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) core. Coherently with the proposed model, experimental measurements show a minimum startup voltage of 228 mV for the MnZn ferrite core and of 104 mV for the LTCC core

Fast-waking and low-voltage thermoelectric and photovoltaic CMOS chargers for energy-harvesting wireless microsensors

The small size of wireless microsystems allows them to be deployed within larger systems to sense and monitor various indicators throughout many applications. However, their small size restricts the amount of energy that can be stored in the system. Current microscale battery technologies do not store enough energy to power the microsystems for more than a few months without recharging. Harvesting ambient energy to replenish the on-board battery extend the lifetime of the microsystem. Although light and thermal energy are more practical in some applications than other forms of ambient energy, they nevertheless suffer from long energy droughts. Additionally, due to the very limited space available in the microsystem, the system cannot store enough energy to continue operation throughout these energy droughts. Therefore, the microsystem must reliably wake from these energy droughts, even if the on-board battery has been depleted. The challenge here is waking a microsystem directly from an ambient source transducer whose voltage and power levels are limited due to their small size. Starter circuits must be used to ensure the system wakes regardless of the state of charge of the energy storage device. The purpose of the presented research is to develop, design, simulate, fabricate, test and evaluate CMOS integrated circuits that can reliably wake from no energy conditions and quickly recharge a depleted battery. Since the battery is depleted during startup, the system must use the low voltage produced by the energy harvesting transducer to transfer energy. The presented system has the fastest normalized wake time while reusing the inductor already present in the battery charger for startup, therefore, minimizing the overall footprint of the system.Ph.D

A 1.1 nW Energy-Harvesting System with 544 pW Quiescent Power for Next-Generation Implants

This paper presents a nW power management unit (PMU) for an autonomous wireless sensor that sustains itself by harvesting energy from the endocochlear potential (EP), the 70-100 mV electrochemical bio-potential inside the mammalian ear. Due to the anatomical constraints inside the inner ear, the total extractable power from the EP is limited close to 1.1-6.25 nW. A nW boost converter is used to increase the input voltage (30-55 mV) to a higher voltage (0.8-1.1 V) usable by CMOS circuits in the sensor. A pW charge pump circuit is used to minimize the leakage in the boost converter. Furthermore, ultralow-power control circuits consisting of digital implementations of input impedance adjustment circuits and zero current switching circuits along with Timer and Reference circuits keep the quiescent power of the PMU down to 544 pW. The designed boost converter achieves a peak power conversion efficiency of 56%. The PMU can sustain itself, and a duty-cyled ultralow-power load while extracting power from the EP of a live guinea pig. The PMU circuits have been implemented on a 0.18- μm CMOS process.Semiconductor Research Corporation. Focus Center for Circuit and System Solutions (C2S2)Interconnect Focus Center (United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Semiconductor Research Corporation)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant K08 DC010419)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32 DC00038)Bertarelli Foundatio

Smart energy management and conversion

This chapter introduced power management circuits and energy storage unit designs for sub‐1 mW low power energy harvesting technologies, including indoor light energy harvesting, thermoelectric energy harvesting and vibration energy harvesting. The solutions address several of the problems associated with energy harvesting, power management and storage issues including low voltage operation, self‐start, efficiency (conversion efficiency as well as impact of power consumption of the power management circuit itself), energy density and leakage current levels. Additionally, efforts to miniaturize and integrate magnetic parts as well as integrate discrete circuits onto silicon are outlined to offer improvements in cost, size and efficiency. Finally initial results from efforts to improve energy density of storage devices using nanomaterials are introduced

A 32 mV/69 mV input voltage booster based on a piezoelectric transformer for energy harvesting applications

This paper presents a novel method for battery-less circuit start-up from ultra-low voltage energy harvesting sources. The approach proposes for the first time the use of a Piezoelectric Transformer (PT) as the key component of a step-up oscillator. The proposed oscillator circuit is first modelled from a theoretical point of view and then validated experimentally with a commercial PT. The minimum achieved start-up voltage is about 69 mV, with no need for any external magnetic component. Hence, the presented system is compatible with the typical output voltages of thermoelectric generators (TEGs). Oscillation is achieved through a positive feedback coupling the PT with an inverter stage made up of JFETs. All the used components are in perspective compatible with microelectronic and MEMS technologies. In addition, in case the use of a ∼40 μH inductor is acceptable, the minimum start-up voltage becomes as low as about 32 mV

Very-Large-Scale-Integration Circuit Techniques in Internet-of-Things Applications

Heading towards the era of Internet-of-things (IoT) means both opportunity and challenge for the circuit-design community. In a system where billions of devices are equipped with the ability to sense, compute, communicate with each other and perform tasks in a coordinated manner, security and power management are among the most critical challenges. Physically unclonable function (PUF) emerges as an important security primitive in hardware-security applications; it provides an object-specific physical identifier hidden within the intrinsic device variations, which is hard to expose and reproduce by adversaries. Yet, designing a compact PUF robust to noise, temperature and voltage remains a challenge. This thesis presents a novel PUF design approach based on a pair of ultra-compact analog circuits whose output is proportional to absolute temperature. The proposed approach is demonstrated through two works: (1) an ultra-compact and robust PUF based on voltage-compensated proportional-to-absolute-temperature voltage generators that occupies 8.3× less area than the previous work with the similar robustness and twice the robustness of the previously most compact PUF design and (2) a technique to transform a 6T-SRAM array into a robust analog PUF with minimal overhead. In this work, similar circuit topology is used to transform a preexisting on-chip SRAM into a PUF, which further reduces the area in (1) with no robustness penalty. In this thesis, we also explore techniques for power management circuit design. Energy harvesting is an essential functionality in an IoT sensor node, where battery replacement is cost-prohibitive or impractical. Yet, existing energy-harvesting power management units (EH PMU) suffer from efficiency loss in the two-step voltage conversion: harvester-to-battery and battery-to-load. We propose an EH PMU architecture with hybrid energy storage, where a capacitor is introduced in addition to the battery to serve as an intermediate energy buffer to minimize the battery involvement in the system energy flow. Test-case measurements show as much as a 2.2× improvement in the end-to-end energy efficiency. In contrast, with the drastically reduced power consumption of IoT nodes that operates in the sub-threshold regime, adaptive dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for supply-voltage margin removal, fully on-chip integration and high power conversion efficiency (PCE) are required in PMU designs. We present a PMU–load co-design based on a fully integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converter (SC-DC) and hybrid error/replica-based regulation for a fully digital PMU control. The PMU is integrated with a neural spike processor (NSP) that achieves a record-low power consumption of 0.61 µW for 96 channels. A tunable replica circuit is added to assist the error regulation and prevent loss of regulation. With automatic energy-robustness co-optimization, the PMU can set the SC-DC’s optimal conversion ratio and switching frequency. The PMU achieves a PCE of 77.7% (72.2%) at VIN = 0.6 V (1 V) and at the NSP’s margin-free operating point

Integrated Circuits for Programming Flash Memories in Portable Applications

Smart devices such as smart grids, smart home devices, etc. are infrastructure systems that connect the world around us more than before. These devices can communicate with each other and help us manage our environment. This concept is called the Internet of Things (IoT). Not many smart nodes exist that are both low-power and programmable. Floating-gate (FG) transistors could be used to create adaptive sensor nodes by providing programmable bias currents. FG transistors are mostly used in digital applications like Flash memories. However, FG transistors can be used in analog applications, too. Unfortunately, due to the expensive infrastructure required for programming these transistors, they have not been economical to be used in portable applications. In this work, we present low-power approaches to programming FG transistors which make them a good candidate to be employed in future wireless sensor nodes and portable systems. First, we focus on the design of low-power circuits which can be used in programming the FG transistors such as high-voltage charge pumps, low-drop-out regulators, and voltage reference cells. Then, to achieve the goal of reducing the power consumption in programmable sensor nodes and reducing the programming infrastructure, we present a method to program FG transistors using negative voltages. We also present charge-pump structures to generate the necessary negative voltages for programming in this new configuration

On-Chip Solar Energy Harvester and PMU With Cold Start-Up and Regulated Output Voltage for Biomedical Applications

This paper presents experimental results from a system that comprises a fully autonomous energy harvester with a solar cell of 1 mm 2 as energy transducer and a Power Management Unit (PMU) on the same silicon substrate, and an output voltage regulator. Both chips are implemented in standard 0.18 μm CMOS technology with total layout areas of 1.575 mm 2 and 0.0126 mm 2 , respectively. The system also contains an off-the-shelf 3.2 mm × 2.5 mm × 0.9 mm supercapacitor working as an off-chip battery or energy reservoir between the PMU and the voltage regulator. Experimental results show that the fast energy recovery of the on-chip solar cell and PMU permits the system to replenish the supercapacitor with enough charge as to sustain Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communications even with input light powers of 510 nW. The whole system is able to self-start-up without external mechanisms at 340 nW. This work is the first step towards a self-supplied sensor node with processing and communication capabilities. The small form factor and ultra-low power consumption of the system components is in compliance with biomedical applications requirementsThis work was supported in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) under Project RTI2018-097088-B-C32 and Project RTI2018-095994-B-I00 (MICINN/FEDER), in part by the Xunta de Galicia, in part by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2016-2019, ED431G/08 and reference competitive group 2017-2020, ED431C 2017/69) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and in part by the Junta de Extremadura and the ERDF, under Grant IB 18079S