An efficient on-chip energy processing circuit for micro-scale energy harvesting systems

Extracting the maximum energy, with a minimum loss, from an energy harvesting source is one of the primary design goal of an energy processing circuit, and to realize it, an optimized energy processing circuitry is required. An efficient on-chip energy processing circuit is proposed for micro-scale energy harvesting system. When there is an enough ambient energy or more than the energy demand by the load, the proposed architecture can directly supply this energy to the load, through a single DC-DC converter, instead of two DC-DC converters, like in a traditional architecture. Thereby, one can expect higher system efficiency as it is not utilizing two converters every time. The proposed energy processing circuit has been designed using 0.18-μm CMOS technology node and the circuit simulations demonstrate that the proposed architecture offers system efficiency of 82.8%, under 600LUX.