[2020] Small power management integrated circuits (PMICs) for energy harvesters

A small form factor is a requirement of wearable and portable IoT devices. Therefore, all their internal components must have a small PCB footprint, which is also the case for power management and energy harvesting components. Small power management integrated circuits (PMICs) can be designed in such a way that they can be fully integrated or have a small number of external components. However, there is a limit in PMIC’s power density and when the input power requirement increases, a PMIC with increased size must be designed.

The available power range required by customers ranges from 10 μW to 100 mW. The full range must be processed by a single IC. Therefore, the PMIC size must be large enough to obtain a high power conversion efficiency (PCE) at the high end of this range. Which presents a challenge, since it is not desirable to increase the PMIC PCB footprint.

Assignment

The goal of this project is to design a power converter that presents a high PCE in the afore-mentioned range while presenting a small PCB footprint. There are several power converter topologies that could be employed in an attempt to achieve this goal. Each one of them presents different characteristics in terms of power density, number of external components, complexity, etc. Therefore, a study of the several topologies must be realized in order to select the most suitable one, or to design a hybrid topology that combines the advantages of different topologies. Finally, the ideal design must have a small footprint, a high PCE, and a controllable conversion ratio to comply with different energy harvesting sources.

Requirements

Student EE-ME with a genuine interest in energy harvesting and power management. Recommended completed courses are: Structured Electronic Design (EE4109), Analog Integrated Circuit Design (ET4252) and Power conversion techniques in CMOS technology (ET4382).

Contact

prof.dr.ir. Wouter Serdijn

Bioelectronics Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2021-05-04