An efficient energy harvesting circuit for batteryless IoT devices

Abstract

A new energy harvesting circuit for battery-less IoT beacon tags is developed herein to maximize power conversion efficiency as well as high throughput power with a wide input–output range. This design energy harvest (EH) circuit incorporates a charge pump (CP) with shoot-through current suppression, a body selector circuit, a maximum power point tracking circuit (MPPT), a timing control circuit, a hysteresis control circuit and a low dropout regulator. Also in this MPPT circuit is a gated clock tuned in a self-adaptive fashion to match the input impedance of the EH circuit to the output impedance of the photovoltaic (PV) panel, thus achieving successfully maximum power point. The circuit is implemented in an integrated chip in an area of 1.2 mm2 via the TSMC 0.18 process. Experiments on the chip are conducted and the results show that the input voltage range is allowed from 0.55 to 1.7 V to effectively harvest the solar power from a flexible dye-sensitized solar cell. The achieved peak power conversion efficiency (PCE) is 77% at the input power of 52 μW. For a wide range of lighting luminance (300–1300 lx,) the achieved average PCE is more than 70%. The achieved wide input–output range and the maximum throughput power of 200 μW is much larger than others reported, while the 77% of PCE is close to that best power conversion efficiency reported.