International audienceHarvesting energy from the environment is very desirable for many emerging applications that use embedded devices. Energy harvesting also known as energy scavenging enables us to guarantee quasi-perpetual system operation for wireless sensors, medical implants, etc. without requiring human intervention which is normally necessary for recharging batteries in classical battery-operated systems. Nevertheless, energy harvesting calls for solving numerous technological problems in relation with chemistry when batteries are used for temporary energy storage for example, power management of the embedded computing system that consumes the energy, etc. And this latter problem becomes more complex when the embedded system has real-time constraints i.e. deadlines attached to computations. This paper surveys the main issues involved in designing energy harvesting embedded systems that present strict timing requirements
