A 6.45 μW Self-Powered SoC With Integrated Energy-Harvesting Power Management and ULP Asymmetric Radios for Portable Biomedical Systems

This paper presents a batteryless system-on-chip (SoC) that operates off energy harvested from indoor solar cells and/or thermoelectric generators (TEGs) on the body. Fabricated in a commercial 0.13 mu W process, this SoC sensing platform consists of an integrated energy harvesting and power management unit (EH-PMU) with maximum power point tracking, multiple sensing modalities, programmable core and a low power microcontroller with several hardware accelerators to enable energy-efficient digital signal processing, ultra-low-power (ULP) asymmetric radios for wireless transmission, and a 100 nW wake-up radio. The EH-PMU achieves a peak end-to-end efficiency of 75% delivering power to a 100 mu A load. In an example motion detection application, the SoC reads data from an accelerometer through SPI, processes it, and sends it over the radio. The SPI and digital processing consume only 2.27 mu W, while the integrated radio consumes 4.18 mu W when transmitting at 187.5 kbps for a total of 6.45 mu W.