Power management unit for solar energy harvester assisted batteryless wireless sensor node

Abstract

This work describes an energy-efficient monolithic Power Management Unit (PMU) that includes a charge pump adapted to photovoltaic cells with the capability of charging a large supply capacitor and managing the stored energy efficiently to provide the required supply voltage and power to low energy consumption wireless sensor nodes such as RFID sensor tags. The proposed system starts-up self-sufficiently with a light source luminosity equal to or higher than 500 lux using only a 1.42 cm(2) solar cell and integrating an energy monitor that gives the ability to supply autonomous sensor nodes with discontinuous operation modes. The system occupies an area of 0.97 mm(2) with a standard 180 nm CMOS technology. The half-floating architecture avoids losses of charging the top/button plate of the stray capacitors in each clock cycle. Measurements' results on a fabricated IC exhibit an efficiency above 60% delivering 13.14 mu W over 1.8 V. The harvested energy is enough to reach the communication range of a standard UHF RFID sensor tag up to 21 m.