CMOS blocks for ultra-low-power sensing systems
(2013)
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CMOSBlocksforUltra-Low-PowerSensingSystems.pdf
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Flandre, Denis
- Abstract
- For a few years now, everything has been getting “green”. Reduction of the ecological footprint has become a public fad and buzzwords such as green industry and green transportation have entered into the everyday language. Electronics is no exception to the rule. Ultra-low-power (ULP) design of integrated circuits has spread out during the last decade, leading to exciting research topics, among which emerging applications such as sensor networks or RFID tags. Those applications generally feature a low data throughput which easily allows for targeting a reduction of the power consumption. Ultimately, this could give rise to new application trends based on energy-autonomous systems (EAS) which however did not reach their full potential yet. Indeed, many applications such as body-implanted or infrastructure-integrated micro sensors require their autonomy to reach over 10 to 100 years while being miniaturized. A limitation comes from the fact that battery density did not follow this miniaturization trend, pushing ahead the need for highly efficient energy scavenging sources and integrated circuits in order for the incident and consumed powers to match. Given the very low activity of such systems, power consumption may be dominated by static leakage. Therefore, along with an appropriate technology choice and without compromising the functional performance, specific disruptive ultra-low-leakage design techniques for drastically reducing the off-current in CMOS mixed analog-digital microsystems must be developed. This thesis contributes to the development of low-cost energy-autonomous systems by proposing design methodologies and techniques together with fully CMOS compatible dedicated blocks. We focus more particularly here on the analog circuit blocks: AC/DC power converters for environmental energy scavenging, hybrid analog-digital LDO for power management and ultra-low-power sensor interface. Altogether, we demonstrate the feasibility of designing the transponder of a sensor node with a power consumption that remains below 10µW while preserving performances.
- Affiliations
Citations
Gosset, G. (2013). CMOS blocks for ultra-low-power sensing systems. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/46089