Ultra-low power CMOS circuit design for energy harvesting applications

Abstract

Harvesting energy from the environment has become a very suitable option for supplying devices where finite battery life is a major drawback. In miniaturized energy harvesting powered devices, the amount of energy is very limited, making essential the use of circuitry with the lowest possible consumption. The work carried out in this thesis has been focused on designing essential analog electronic blocks maintaining the power consumption as low as possible. To achieve this in CMOS technology, the subthreshold region of the transistor must be exploited. Under this premise, two voltage references and two voltage regulators are presented. Furthermore, an improved DC DC converter operating with subthreshold input voltages while maintaining good power efficiency is proposed too.