Review of energy harvesting techniques and applications for microelectronics

L Mateu, F Moll - VLSI Circuits and Systems II, 2005 - spiedigitallibrary.org
VLSI Circuits and Systems II, 2005spiedigitallibrary.org
The trends in technology allow the decrease in both size and power consumption of
complex digital systems. This decrease in size and power gives rise to new paradigms of
computing and use of electronics, with many small devices working collaboratively or at
least with strong communication capabilities. Examples of these new paradigms are
wearable devices and wireless sensor networks. Currently, these devices are powered by
batteries. However, batteries present several disadvantages: the need to either replace or …
The trends in technology allow the decrease in both size and power consumption of complex digital systems. This decrease in size and power gives rise to new paradigms of computing and use of electronics, with many small devices working collaboratively or at least with strong communication capabilities. Examples of these new paradigms are wearable devices and wireless sensor networks. Currently, these devices are powered by batteries. However, batteries present several disadvantages: the need to either replace or recharge them periodically and their big size and weight compared to high technology electronics. One possibility to overcome these power limitations is to extract (harvest) energy from the environment to either recharge a battery, or even to directly power the electronic device. This paper presents several methods to design an energy harvesting device depending on the type of energy avaliable.
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