Abstract
This paper aims to review the recent architectures of power management units for ultrasound-based energy harvesting, while focusing on battery-less implantable medical devices. In such systems, energy sustainability is based on piezoelectric devices and a power management circuit, which represents a key building block since it maximizes the power extracted from the piezoelectric devices and delivers it to the other building blocks of the implanted device. Since the power budget is strongly constrained by the dimension of the piezoelectric energy harvester, complexity of topologies have been increased bit by bit in order to achieve improved power efficiency also in difficult operative conditions. With this in mind, the introduced work consists of a comprehensive presentation of the main blocks of a generic power management unit for ultrasound-based energy harvesting and its operative principles, a review of the prior art and a comparative study of the performance achieved by the considered solutions. Finally, design guidelines are provided, allowing the designer to choose the best topology according to the given design specifications and technology adopted.
Highlights
Battery-powered electronics systems, such as wearable and mobile devices, wireless sensors, and medical devices are widely used during the everyday life
After a general presentation of the widely adopted topologies which constitute the core of the power management section, the state-of-the-art has been reviewed and the various solutions have been compared
Converter topologies have evolved to cope with technological progress, satisfying increasingly stringent constraints given by current applications
Summary
Battery-powered electronics systems, such as wearable and mobile devices, wireless sensors, and medical devices are widely used during the everyday life. Some examples are vibrations gathered from patient movements, breathing activity, and heartbeats through piezoelectric devices, or temperature gradients between the inner body, the skin and the air that are converted into voltage by thermo-electric generators (TEGs) [11,12,13] These in-body sources provide extremely low and unpredictable power levels which prevent their adoption in most applications [14,15,16]. New schemes, aimed to reduce the silicon area which occupy and improve their power efficiency, are continuously studied and introduced in the literature [6] With this in mind, this paper is aimed to provide a deep-insight of energy harvesting systems from US waves targeted to feed IMDs. With this in mind, this paper is aimed to provide a deep-insight of energy harvesting systems from US waves targeted to feed IMDs This is allowed by analyzing the design constraints and basic topologies used to satisfy the specifications required by application, and reviewing the state-of-the-art.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
