A Top-Down Approach to Building Battery-Less Self-Powered Systems for the Internet-of-Things

Abstract

This paper presents a top-down methodology for designing battery-less systems for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). We start by extracting features from a target IoT application and the environment in which it will be deployed. We then present strategies to translate these features into design choices that optimize the system and improve its reliability. We look into how to use these features to build the digital sub-system by determining the blocks to implement, the digital architecture, the clock rate of the system, the memory capacity, and the low power states. We also review how these features impact the choice of energy harvesting power management units.

Keywords

• Internet-of-Things
• battery-less
• self-powered
• ultra-low power
• systems-on-chip
• energy harvesting