A Novel TSV-Based power harvesting system for low-power applications

Abstract

This paper presents a Novel TSV-Based power harvesting system for low-power applications. The proposed system can harvest the energy from the coupling power between the signal through silicon vias (TSVs) in the 3D-SoC. The proposed system consists of three modules: energy source, energy harvesting which is based on TSV-based patch antenna, and power management module. The energy harvester module consists of three sub-modules: TSV-based patch antenna, 8-stage voltage multiplier and regulator, and energy storage. TSV technology is used to build an antenna on high resistivity substrate to be used as a transducer for the energy harvester system. The characteristic of this antenna is a function of TSV diameter, TSV length, and silicon resistivity. Compared to conventional on-chip antennas which suffers from low gain and low radiation efficiency, our novel antenna provides better performance parameters such as higher radiation pattern efficiency and higher gain as the antenna delivers a high gain of 5.8 dBi and the radiation efficiency is 86% over the prescribed range of frequencies. The proposed antenna is centered at 2.4 GHz with 200 MHz bandwidth. The overall area of the proposed antenna is 400µm×100µm. Building the antenna using TSV technology not only improves the performance, but also improves the isolation between the antenna and other active circuits. Simulations show that we are able to obtain dc voltage up to 2.5 V which is suitable for many low-power applications.