Threshold Voltage Control to Improve Energy Utilization Efficiency of a Power Management Circuit for Energy Harvesting Applications

Abstract

This work presents a design approach that improves power management circuit (PMC) for energy harvesting applications so that more of the harvested energy can be utilized by the wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) to perform useful tasks. The proposed method is widely applicable to different circuits by setting an appropriate threshold voltage at the energy flow control interface of the circuit. Experimental results show that with a threshold voltage difference of around 20 mV, the energy output from the PMC can differ by more than 5%. This difference is significant over a long period of time as more tasks can be performed by the WSN with the extra energy.

Keywords

• energy harvesting
• power management
• threshold voltage control
• wireless sensor node