Ultra low-voltage energy harvesting
Content of the lecture:
In energy harvesting applications, the voltage produced by energy sources can be extremely low despite the sustainable currents may be significant. In battery-less configurations, this may affect the activation of conventional switched-mode boost circuitry, and specific bootstrap circuits may be required to initially generate a higher voltage in order to enable power converters and application circuits. Ultra-low input voltages also set some constraints in the design of the power converter.
This lecture will review relevant circuit topologies of step-up oscillators for boosting ultra-low voltages up to the range of conventional supply voltages, and summarize the state of the art for power conversion from ultra-low voltages. Some existing cases will be presented.
Teacher: Prof. Aldo Romani
Aldo Romani currently serves as Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering at the Campus of Cesena of the University of Bologna. His research topics include micro-/nano-power electronic design, circuits for energy harvesting, and applications of piezoelectric transducers. He participated to several European and national research projects. He is currently a supervisor of the IC design activities of the joint laboratory of STMicroelectronics and the University of Bologna. He is a co-recipient of the 2004 Jan Van Vessem Award of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference and is co-author of over 80 publications and patents.