Fully Integrated Low-Power Energy Harvesting System With Simplified Ripple Correlation Control for System-on-a-Chip Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a fully integrated energy harvesting (EH) system that even includes an input capacitor and a simplified ripple correlation control (RCC) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method for low-power system-on-a-chip applications. The proposed system implements the RCC block with a charge pump (CP) that can be integrated into the chip, instead of the inductive switching converter that is commonly used for conventional RCC methods. The CP changes the input impedance by changing the size of the flying capacitor to ensure system reliability. The simplified RCC method is implemented using a low-power analog divider operated in a subthreshold region. A test chip fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process achieves over 95% MPPT accuracy with a very small input capacitor of 5 nF and a low quiescent current of 2.6 μA. The chip size of the entire system is 8 mm2, and the harvested power range is from 6 μ W to 1.4 mW.