Light Micro-Energy Harvesting in Standard CMOS Technologies

The final goal of this PhD thesis is to design a light micro-energy harvesting system in standard CMOS technologies including an on-chip solar cell and the Power Management Unit (PMU) on the same silicon substrate. For this, a new accurate model including the charge reusing technique was developed to help in the design process of charge pumps. Also, other new simple model was developed to study the transient analysis of the joint effect of a photodiode (on-chip solar cell) and a charge pump driven by two clock signals. Finally, a new architecture of an energy harvesting system which consists of a PMU powered by a 1 mm2 on-chip solar cell to rise up the harvested voltage to an output voltage higher than 1.1 V was successfully designed and tested. The PMU is able to start up from a harvested power of 2.38 nW without any external kick off or control signal achieving a peak efficiency of 57% during normal operation.

keywords: On-chip energy harvesting, Standard CMOS technologies, Microelectronics