Energy-Harvesting IC Design

In recent year, energy harvesting technologies from the ambient environments such as light, motion, wireless waves, and temperature again a lot of attraction form research community [1-5] due to its efficient solution in order to substitute for conventional power delivery methods, especially in wearable together with on-body applications. The drawbacks of battery-powered characteristic used in commodity applications lead to self-powered, long-lifetime circuit design. Thermoelectric generator, a solid-state sensor, is useful compared to the harvesting devices in order to enable self-sustained low-power applications. TEG based on the Seebeck effect is utilized to transfer thermal energy which is available with a temperature gradient into useful electrical energy. Depending on the temperature difference between two sides, amount of output power will be proportionally delivered. In this work, we illustrated a low-input voltage energy harvesting circuit applied discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) method for getting an adequate amount of energy from thermoelectric generator (TEG) for a specific wearable application. With a small temperature gradient harvested from human skin, the input voltage from the transducer is as low as 60mV, the proposed circuit, fabricated in a 0.6µm Nuvoton CMOS process, is capable of generating a regulated output voltage of 4.2V with an output power reaching to 40µW. The proposed circuit is useful for powering energy to battery-less systems, such as wearable application devices.

Research report: Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting Circuit With 60-mV Input Voltage

RF-Thermal Energy Harvesting System