Yousef Shakhsheer, Benton Calhoun
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Abstract
Advances in custom integrated circuit design allow wireless micro-sensors, used for gathering environmental and biological data, to be power solely by energy harvesting. This development allows for improved sensor size, weight, and lifetime, but provides a new set of challenges to power the sensor off of varying power over the sensors’ lifetime. These power harvesting-powered micro-sensors require power harvesting-specific power management schemes to adapt current consumption to the changing power harvesting input to prevent node death and. This paper details the second revision of a body sensor node power management system, called the Digital Power Manager (DPM). The DPM samples the energy available on the storage capacitor (which is charged by the harvester) through an analog-to-digital converter or a ring oscillator, and adjusts energy node consumption by powergating blocks in real-time to ensure the node will survive to continue to collect data or transmit important data. This revision of the
DPM addresses the limitations of the previous revision of lack of programmability, lack of scalability, reliance on the ADC, and lock up for an energy harvesting BSN. This revision is flexible enough to be used in future revision of sensors.
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