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Micro-Scale Energy Harvesting: A System Design Perspective

Chao Lu, Vijay Raghunathan, Kaushik Roy School of ECE, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN E-mail: {lu43, vr, kaushik}@purdue.edu
Abstract - Harvesting electrical power from environmental energy sources is an attractive and increasingly feasible option for several micro-scale electronic systems such as biomedical implants and wireless sensor nodes that need to operate autonomously for long periods of time (months to years). However, designing highly efficient micro-scale energy harvesting systems requires an in-depth understanding of various design considerations and tradeoffs. This paper provides an overview of the area of micro-scale energy harvesting and discusses the various challenges and considerations involved from a system-design perspective.

I. Introduction
Rapid advances in nanoscale integration have resulted in a new class of miniaturized electronic systems (e.g., smart dust sensors [1], biomedical implants [2]) that enable new application domains. Despite the stringent constraints on size (and hence battery capacity), these systems are often required to operate for several months to years without the need for battery replacement, because frequent battery replacement may be either infeasible or prohibitively expensive. Environmental energy harvesting represents an attractive approach to alleviate the energy supply challenge in these systems and has the potential to result in self-powered, perpetual system operation [3] [4]. While the basic idea of environmental energy harvesting has been extensively explored and applied at the macro-scale in the context of large systems such as solar farms, windmills, etc., designing micro-scale energy harvesting systems involves several new challenges. Most of these challenges stem from the fact that the form-factor constraint in these systems mandates the use of miniature energy transducers (a few cm3). As a result, the maximum power output of these micro-scale transducers is extremely small, often only a few mW. Therefore, the harvesting subsystem should be carefully designed to extract as much power as possible from the transducer and transfer it to the electronic system with minimal loss, which requires extremely energy efficient design. This paper presents an overview of the various system-level tradeoffs and design considerations involved in designing such highly efficient micro-scale energy harvesting systems. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of a micro-scale energy harvesting system. The system can be viewed as consisting of four main components. The first component is the energy transducer that captures energy from an ambient source and converts it into electrical energy. We discuss the operation and modeling of various energy transducers in Section II. The second component is the power conversion circuit that serves as the load for the energy transducer. The power conversion circuit accepts the input electrical power produced by the transducer and conditions it for use by the system being powered. This step involves voltage rectification, if needed, followed by voltage level conversion. The power conversion circuit also ensures that the transducer operates at high efficiency (using a technique called maximum power point tracking).

The design of efficient power converters and maximum power point tracking schemes for micro-scale energy systems is an active area of research and discussed further in Sections III and IV. The third component is the energy storage subsystem that stores the harvested energy for later use by the electronic system. The tradeoffs involved in selecting energy storage elements are discussed in Section V. The electronic system that operates using the harvested power makes up the final component of the micro-scale energy harvesting system. The power consumption of the target system can be dynamically adjusted (using various power management techniques) to match the amount of power available from the environmental energy source, resulting in an adaptive, self-sustaining system. Power management techniques to achieve this are discussed in Section VI.

Fig. 1: Block diagram of a micro-scale harvesting system

II.Micro-Scale Energy Transducers

Environmental energy sources abound in our immediate surroundings. Examples of such energy sources include solar radiation, air flow, mechanical motion/vibration, thermal gradients, radio frequency (RF) transmissions, etc. A variety of micro-scale transducers have been developed to convert energy from other modalities into electrical energy [5]-[14]. Compared to conventional energy sources, such as batteries, where total capacity (typically measured in Ampere-hours) or energy density (typically measured in Watt-hour/cm3) is the main figure-of-merit, the dominant characteristic of energy transducers is their power density (Watt/cm3). This is because transducers will never run out of energy (barring any hardware failures) as long as the environmental energy source is present, and hence, cannot be viewed as capacity-limited energy sources. Table 1 shows the estimated power densities of a few commonly used energy-harvesting modalities [28]. While there has been (continues to be) extensive research from the device perspective to improve the cost, conversion efficiency, and power density of transducers, it is crucial for system designers to understand their electrical characteristics in-depth in order to analyze their impact on the system being powered. In the remainder of this section, we provide an overview of various energy-harvesting modalities and describe how some of these transducers can be modeled.

978-1-4244-5767-0/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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TABLE I: Power densities of various energy harvesting modalities

the output current and terminal voltage of the PV module, respectively.

One way to categorize micro-scale energy transducers is based on how the transducers are configured (i.e., single transducer vs. a stack of transducers) to form an energy supply sub-system. Since the output voltage of a single energy transducer (e.g., 0-0.7V for a fuel cell [12], 0-0.5V for a PV cell [16]) is often too low to be directly used as a power supply, multiple transducers can be stacked in series to obtain higher output voltage. For example, PV panels or modules [29] are usually composed of multiple PV cells connected in series/parallel configurations. However, such a stack configuration may not be viable in all micro-scale systems due to size and packaging considerations [17]. The transducer configuration is a crucial design decision because it significantly impacts the design and performance of the power conversion circuitry attached to the output of the transducer. For example, commercially available DC-DC converters can obtain power conversion efficiencies of as high as 95% for input voltages well above 1V. However, it is difficult to obtain such high efficiencies for ultra-low input voltages, say less than 0.3V [32]. Another way of classifying micro-scale transducers is according to whether they produce alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) power. Transducers such as piezoelectric cantilever beams and RF antennae output AC power, whereas transducers such as PV cells, fuel cells, and thermoelectric generators (TEG) output DC power. Since integrated circuits usually operate off a DC power source, an additional AC-DC conversion (rectification) step is required inside the power converters used in RF or vibration-based energy harvesting systems. It is also possible to synergistically combine multiple harvesting modalities to form a hybrid energy transducer. This can potentially decrease the temporal variability in generated power and increase the total amount of harvested energy in a given time duration, especially if the modalities involved are carefully selected. The drawback of such an approach is an increase in the complexity of the power conversion circuits and the overhead of managing the flow of power from multiple sources. The simple design choice of implementing independent power converters for each energy transducer is neither economical nor very power efficient. Designing and power managing embedded systems that feature multiple energy harvesting modalities is an open area of research. A. Characterizing energy transducers In this section, we present two illustrative examples of how energy transducers can be modeled and characterized, namely a micro-scale PV cell from SolarWorld Inc. and a thermoelectric generator (TEG) from Micropelt Inc. Fig. 2 shows the equivalent electrical circuit model of a miniature PV module [16], which is composed mainly of a current source and a forward biased diode. IPH,SC is the generated photocurrent, RS is the parasitic series resistance, and RP is the equivalent shunt resistance. IPH and VPH are

Fig. 2: The electrical model of a PV module Based on the circuit shown in Fig. 2, the output current (IPH) and power (PPH) of a PV module can be expressed as:
q (VPH + I PH RS ) VPH + I PH RS 1 I PH = I PH , SC I SAT e AKT RP PPH = I PH VPH (1)

Here, ISAT is the reverse saturation current, q is the electron charge, A is a dimensional factor, K is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the operating temperature in Kelvin. We conducted experiments using a commercial PV module (Mode 1-100, Solar World Inc. [29]) to validate this model. The PV module was characterized under weak light (indoor) conditions. The PV module was illuminated using a 40-Watt light bulb and the distance between them was adjusted to emulate changing light conditions. Various resistive loads were connected to the PV module and the output voltage and current were measured. Fig. 3 plots the I-V curve of the PV module obtained using equation (1) and measured experimentally. We can see that the measured IPH values fit well with the values predicted by the electrical model. Fig. 4 plots the output power (PPH) of the PV module as a function of its terminal voltage.
4500 4000 PV Cell Output Current (uA) 1548 Lux Measurement Simulation

3000

2000

784 Lux

1000

504 Lux

0 0

100 200 300 PV Cell Output Voltage (mV)

400

Fig. 3: Measured I-V characteristic of the PV cell

1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 0 784LUX Measurement Simulation 1548LUX

PV Cell Output Power (uW)

504LUX

100 200 300 PV Cell Output Voltage (mV)

400

Fig. 4: Output power vs. output voltage for the PV cell Next, we discuss the characterization of a micro-scale TEG. The open circuit voltage of a TEG is proportional to the number of leg pairs, the actual temperature difference T and a material-related coefficient (called the Seebeck coefficient), as shown in the equation below:
VOC = N LEGPAIRS T (2)

The Micropelt MPG-D602 is a good example of a micro-scale TEG device [30]. Figure 5(a) plots the current and voltage relationship for different T across the

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MPG-D602. Figure 5(b) shows the output power varies as a function of output voltage for different T obtained using the simulation tool provided by the TEG manufacturer [31]. We can see that a TEG can be modeled as a voltage source in series with an internal resistor with the voltage source being proportional to T. Such a model can be expressed using equations (3) and (4), where is a constant (i.e., internal resistor).
VTEG = VOC ITEG
4.5 4 3.5 Output Current (mA) 3 2.5 2 1.5 1
0.2

(3)

PTEG = VTEG ITEG = VTEG (VOC VTEG ) (4)

T=10K T=7.5K T=5K T=2.5K
1 Output Power (mW) 0.8 0.6 0.4 T=2.5K T=5K T=7.5K T=10K

0.5 0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 Output Voltage (V) 0.8 1

0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 Output Voltage (V) 1

(a) (b) Fig. 5: (a) Output current vs. output voltage, and (b) Output power vs. output voltage for the Micropelt TEG B. Maximum Power Point (MPP) As can be seen from Figures 4 and 5, the output power of an energy transducer not only varies with the intensity of the environmental source, but also with the load across its terminals. When the loading impedance is infinite (open circuit) or zero (short circuit), no output power is obtained since either the output current or the output voltage is zero. There exists an optimal loading point that is best matched with the inherent impedance of the used energy transducer. When the optimal loading is applied to an energy transducer, the energy transducer operates at its maximum power point (MPP). For example, as is evident from Figure 4, for a given light irradiance, there exists an optimal output voltage (VMPP) for the PV module at which PPH is maximized (e.g., 0.29V for 784LUX). This point on the I-V curve is the MPP. Note that the MPP changes significantly as the light intensity changes. Empirical measurements on PV cells have also determined that the MPP voltage is typically a specific fraction (between 0.71 and 0.78) of the open circuit voltage [15] [23]. Vibration harvesting through piezoelectric conversion outputs AC power. The output power is related to both the magnitude and frequency of the output waveform. In [25], the authors presented expressions for the optimal voltage of a piezoelectric energy transducer.

Constraints on system size and cost also restrict the selection of power converter structures. A buck/boost converter requires the use of an inductor, whereas a charge pump uses only capacitors for energy storage, making it more amenable to on-chip integration. The terminal voltage levels of the energy transducer and the energy buffer determine whether step-up or step-down conversion is performed inside the power converter. For non-stacked DC output transducers with very low output voltage (e.g., single PV cells), step-up conversion is required. However, extracting energy from such ultra-low voltage sources requires judicious circuit design. The authors of [16] proposed a tree topology charge pump for boosting ultra-low input voltages (0-0.4V) to an energy buffer with terminal voltage of 1V. Compared to linear topology charge pumps, the proposed design improved charge transfer capability by up to 30%. If the output from the energy transducer is AC power, the power converter should perform AC-DC rectification and DC-DC conversion. Several ultra-low power AC-DC design techniques have been proposed. In [21], the authors proposed a hybrid AC-DC rectifier that integrates passive and active rectification techniques. The passive rectifier is used for self-starting, while the active rectifier is used to reduce the diode voltage drop and increase conversion efficiency. To minimize the power loss, some components were operated in the sub-threshold region. In [22], the design of a micro-power RF rectifier is presented. The design of efficient multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) power converters for hybrid energy transducers has also been explored [18], [19]. The basic idea in these designs is to merge two boost converters into one combined structure using a single inductor. Using only one inductor decreases system cost and increases the power conversion efficiency.

IV. MPP Tracking Scheme

As we showed in Section II, the MPP for a transducer changes with the strength of the environmental energy source (e.g., light intensity for PV cells, temperature difference for TEGs). The goal of MPP tracking schemes is to ensure that the energy harvesting system operates at its MPP at any given time in order to maximize the amount of energy extracted. The most significant design consideration for MPP tracking in micro-scale energy harvesting systems is to ensure that MPP tracking introduces minimal power overheads. This is because the output power from a micro-scale energy transducer is very limited to begin with (in the range of tens of W to a few mW). As much of this power as possible should be delivered for use by the system being powered. It is also important to note that the power losses in the converter circuit can also be dependent on the operating point itself. As a result, the most efficient point of operation from a full-system perspective may be different from the MPP of the energy transducer alone [23] [24]. There are several MPP tracking schemes well-suited for micro-scale energy harvesting. The first method is called reference tracking. The basic idea is to easily (with low overhead) generate a reference voltage that approximates the energy transducers MPP and ensure that the transducer operates at this given reference point. For example, it has been shown that for PV cells, the MPP voltage is approximately 75% of its MPP voltage.

III. Power Converter Design

The output voltage of an energy transducer usually does not exactly match the required voltage level in the energy buffer or the electronic system. A power conditioning circuit of some form is usually used to bridge this gap between the output of the transducer and the energy storage sub-system. There are several variants of voltage converters (charge pumps, buck/boost converters, or linear regulators), each with their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Charge pumps or buck/boost converters, although efficient, introduce power supply noise due to their inherent switching nature, making them more suitable for noise-tolerant digital systems. Linear regulators produce less power-supply noise, which is attractive for analog or RF systems that are noise sensitive.

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Therefore, a reasonable strategy might be to periodically sense variations in light intensity by measuring the open circuit voltage and using 75% of the measured value as this reference voltage. The MPP tracking unit adjusts certain parameters of the power converter (e.g., switching frequency of a charge pump or duty cycle of a buck/boost converter) to adjust its operating point. The MPP tracking is complete once the transducers output voltage reaches the generated reference voltage. Example designs using this reference tracking methodology are proposed in [15], [21]. Note that this methodology usually assumes that the transducers MPP is very close to the entire systems MPP, which is not always the case. An alternative tracking method is to use a hill climbing or perturb-and-observe approach. It is implemented by continuously sensing the output current and voltage at either the output of the transducer or the output of the power converter, and multiplying them to obtain the current power output. A small perturbation is induced in the operating point (by adjusting the power converters control parameters) and the effect on the output power is noted. If the output power increases, another perturbation in the same direction is induced. If the output power decreases, the direction of perturbation is reversed. The process is continuously repeated until the MPP is reached. The common approach to implement this iterative control procedure is using a microcontroller (MCU). If the power overhead incurred by an MCU is too high, a dedicated decision generation circuit can be used instead [24]. Yet another MPP tracking method (and one that has not been widely investigated so far) is based on a joint analysis of the electrical models for the energy transducer and the power converter. Using this approach, the first step in MPP tracking is to model the electrical behavior (i.e., I-V curve) of the energy transducer and the power converter. By observing that the output current (voltage) of the transducer is the input current (voltage) of the power converter, it is possible to derive an expression that relates the optimal operating point of the power converter to the output voltage of the transducer. This expression can then be directly implemented using dedicated hardware. The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the need for explicit current and voltage sensing at the output of the transducer or power converter (hence decreasing hardware cost and power overheads). For hybrid energy transducers, MPP tracking becomes more complicated since each transducer may have its own distinct MPP point. If each energy transducer is connected to its own power converter and energy buffer, the MPP tracking process for each transducer can be completely independent because achieving system MPP is equivalent to achieving MPP for each energy source simultaneously. However, when a MIMO power converter and a single energy buffer are used, MPP operation for one transducer may lead to sub-optimal operation of another. Achieving a system-wide optimal operating point is more challenging in this case and involves a careful analysis of the relative power outputs of the individual energy transducers. not suffer as much from aging and rate-capacity problems, which is a severe challenge for rechargeable batteries. Further, super-capacitors usually have a significantly higher round-trip efficiency than batteries. However, in terms of the self-discharge current, super-capacitors are considerably inferior to batteries. Taking into account the above non-idealities, it is possible to develop simple models to analyze the relative energy efficiency of both storage devices. Essentially, if both devices start with the same amount of energy in them, the energy stored in the capacitor degrades at a faster rate than the energy stored in the battery. After some threshold amount of time, the available energy in the capacitor degrades to a point where the battery, even with its low round-trip efficiency would result in a higher deliverable energy capacity. Therefore, the choice of which energy storage device to use is also dependent on the temporal profile of power consumption by the load. Finally, note that it is possible to integrate both a super-capacitor and a rechargeable battery to form a hybrid energy storage mechanism [27].

VI. Power Management Considerations

While careful system design is an important aspect of architecting energy harvesting systems, equally crucial are techniques that adapt the performance and power consumption of the target system at runtime in response to the spatial and temporal variations in harvested energy. In [33], the authors present an adaptive algorithm for harvesting-aware duty cycling of wireless sensor nodes. The authors choose to use duty-cycling between active and low power modes for the purpose of performance/power scaling since most sensor nodes provide at least one low power mode in which the power consumption is negligible. More sophisticated performance/power scaling methods, such as dynamic voltage scaling, may be used when available. Their algorithm consists of three steps, namely (a) learning the harvested energy prole at run-time, (b) adapting the power consumption level to match the harvested energy, and (c) ne tuning the power scaling algorithm to account for battery non-idealities. A signicant challenge with harvesting-aware power management is that determining the optimal duty cycle for a node at a given point in time requires information about the harvested energy availability in the future. The authors overcome this by learning the daily energy generation prole for the harvesting device and use this information to predict the energy availability for the near future. The authors argue that, on a typical day, the energy generation is expected to be similar to the energy generation at the same time on previous days. Based on this, they use an Exponentially Weighted Moving-Average (EWMA) lter based prediction model. The method is designed to exploit the diurnal cycle in solar energy but at the same time adapt to weather and seasonal variations. The predicted energy generated for each 30 minute slot is calculated as a weighted average of the energy received in the same time slot during previous days. The weights are exponential, resulting in decaying weights for older data. More sophisticated prediction models can be used as well [34]. Using a user-dened system utility function that is a function of the duty cycle, the authors solve a lightweight optimization problem that determines duty cycles for each time slot in order to maximize the utility of the system

V. Energy Storage
Most often, either super-capacitors or rechargeable batteries are used as energy storage buffers in embedded systems, both of which have their own advantages and disadvantages [4] [26]. For example, super-capacitors do

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over the course of the entire day. As a post processing step, they account for any errors in the predicted energy prole by adjusting the duty cycle as the day progresses using an approach similar to slack redistribution techniques during power-aware real-time task scheduling. The authors demonstrate that their algorithm utilizes environmental energy more efciently (up to 58%) compared to duty cycling techniques that are not harvesting aware. Adaptive power management for energy harvesting embedded systems is now an increasingly popular area of research [34], [35], [36].
Vibration Energy Harvesters, Integrated Ferroelectrics, vol. 71, pp. 121-160, 2005. [12] K. L. Chu, S. Gold, V. Subramanian, C. Lu, M. A. Shannon, and R. I. Masel, A Nanoporous Silicon Membrane Electrode Assembly for On-chip Micro Fuel Cell Applications, Journal of Microelectromechanical systems, vol.15, issue3, pp.671-677, 2006. [13] W. Sung and J. W. Choi, A Membraneless Microscale Fuel Cell Using Non-Noble Catalysts in Alkaline Solution, Journal of Power Sources, Vol. 172, No. 1, pp. 198-208, 2007. [14] H. Kulah and K. Najafi, An Electromagnetic Micro Power Generator for Low-frequency Environmental Vibrations, Proc. 17th IEEE conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, pp. 237-240, 2004. [15] D. Brunelli and L. Benini, An Efficient Solar Energy Harvester for Wireless Sensor Nodes, Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference, pp. 104-109, 2008. [16] C. Lu, S. P. Park, V. Raghunathan and K. Roy, Efficient Power Conversion for Micro Scale Energy Harvesting, Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference, 2010. [17] J. W. Kimball, T. L. Flowers and P. L. Chapman, Issues with Low-input-voltage Boost Converter Design, IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference, Vol.3, pp. 2152-2156, 2004. [18] N. M. Sze, F. Su, Y.H. Lam, W.H. Ki and C.Y. Tsui, Integrated Single-Inductor Dual-Input Dual-Output Boost Converter for Energy Harvesting Applications, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, pp. 2218-2221, 2008. [19] H. Shao, C. Y. Tsui and W. H. Ki, A Single Inductor Dual Input Dual Output DC-DC Converter with Hybrid Supplies for Solar Energy Harvesting Applications, International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, pp. 69-74, 2009. [20] K. Kobayashi, H. Matsuo, and Y. Sekine, A Novel Optimum Operating Point Tracker of the Solar Cell Power Supply System, IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference, pp. 2147-2151, 2004. [21] L. Chao, C. Y. Tsui and W. H. Ki, Vibration Energy Scavenging and Management for Ultra Low Power Applications, International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, pp. 316-321, 2007. [22] J. Yi, W.H. Ki and C.Y. Tsui, "Analysis and Design Strategy of UHF Micro-power CMOS Rectifiers for Micro-sensor and RFID Applications, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part I, Vol.54, No.1, pp.153-166, 2007. [23] C. Lu, V. Raghunathan and K. Roy, Maximum Power Point Considerations for Micro-Scale Solar Energy Harvesting Systems, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2010. [24] H. Shao, C. Y. Tsui and W. H. Ki, The Design of A Micro Power Management System for Applications Using Photovoltaic Cells with the Maximum Output Power Control, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems, Vol. 17, pp. 1138-1142, 2009. [25] G. K. Ottman, H. F. Hofmann, A. C. Bhatt, and G. A. Lesieutre, Adaptive Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Circuit for Wireless Remote Power Supply, IEEE Transactions On Power Electronics, Vol.17, no. 5, pp. 669-676, 2002. [26] B. Srensen, P. Breeze, A. V. Da Rosa, H. K. Gupta, M. Doble, S. Kalogirou, Renewable Energy Focus Handbook, Academic Press, 2008. [27] X. Jiang, J. Polastre, D. Culler, Perpetual Environmentally Powered Sensor Networks, International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, pp. 463-468, 2005. [28] V. Raghunathan, A. Kansal, J. Hsu, J. Friedman, and M. Srivastava, Design considerations for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems, Proc. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pp. 457-462, 2005. [29] Solar World Inc., (www.solarworld.com) [30] Micropelt, Inc. (www.micropelt.com/)

VII. Conclusions
Environmental energy harvesting represents a promising approach to powering embedded systems and is a feasible option due to rapid advances in low-power design, miniaturization, and materials. The power consumption of many embedded systems has been reduced to the same level as micro-scale energy transducers are capable of generating. The potential for perpetual system operation using energy harvesting is likely to enable new application domains for embedded systems. However, we believe that, to ensure that these energy harvesting embedded systems operate efficiently, the entire system must be optimized in a holistic way from the design of the constituent circuits to power management at the application level.

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