T2B: Ultra-Low Power System Optimization & Energy Harvesting Opportunities

Integration of electronics into system-on-chip solutions means a lot of things. It means finding ways to shrink and incorporate passives into existing substrates, typically enabled by increasing the switching frequency of power converters. It means finding the best opportunities for aggregation of some system aspects, while disaggregating and optimizing others. Most importantly, it means reducing the overall power consumption of a system for a given application. Whether the system be an offline-powered solution (i.e. - bulk power supply, adapter, etc.) or a portable solution (i.e. - battery), the power source is typically a dominant component in the overall form-factor of the system as well as the limiting factor in operating life and/or feature set. When it comes to the tens of billions or even trillions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are predicted to dominate every aspect of our personal and professional lives only a few years from now, ultra-low power devices are sure to make up the far majority. Whether it be 5G edge user equipment like smartphones or ubiquitously deployed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and wireless sensor networks (WSN), the optimization of power budgets <;<;1W is essential to enabling the fantastic marketing projections before us. Combining intelligent power management (IPM) techniques with the array of technological advances that allow us to do so much with so little power these days, there is another key opportunity that has been enabled by these technologies. We now have the ability to supplement a system power source or even completely replace with energy harvesting (EH) sources. This means powering a system from energy scavenged from the ambient environment. In the past, EH has been dismissed as providing negligible power and/or an academic experiment not ready for production, consumer applications. This tutorial not only intends to quickly diminish these common misperceptions, but go further to demonstrate the value (in technical, monetary, and global terms) EH brings to ultra-low power applications and show how such a marriage of technologies is not merely enabling, but actually essential to making a reality out of all the marketing projections. First, we will dive into the strategies behind what goes into a system power budget and identify the key opportunities for power savings and overall reduction of the budget via IPM techniques. Then, we will give a comprehensive overview of what EH is and how the various transducers, power management integrated circuits (PMIC), energy storage, and individual applications allow us to yield usable power from every form of energy physics affords us. Finally, the tutorial will conclude with a series of case studies and real-world examples that demonstrate the path from the constituents of the production EH ecosystem existing today to empowering the deployment of a variety of IoT and other notable solutions. These examples shall speak to a wide range of markets and verticals including, but not limited to IoT (inc. industrial IoT or IIoT), wearables, WSN, medical, autonomous vehicles, factory automation, 5G, environmental monitoring, system management, and more. The tutorial is intended for Design Engineers, Device Architects, System Implementers, Program Managers, & Technical Marketing/Sales Personnel associated with optimizing and enabling ultra-low power products/applications/industries.