A Study on Highly Efficient Energy Harvesting Circuits and Systems

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24656181
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Power engineering/Power conversion/Electric machinery
• Research Institution: Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Principal Investigator: ISHIHARA Noboru 東京工業大学, ソリューション研究機構, 教授 (20396641)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): MASU Kazuya 東京工業大学, フロンティア研究機構, 教授 (20157192) ; ITO Hiroyuki 東京工業大学, 精密工学研究所, 准教授 (40451992)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: エネルギーハーベスティング / RFエネルギー / 昇圧回路 / 集積回路 / 自律分散制御 / 環境エネルギー / 異種エネルギー統合

Outline of Final Research Achievements

To utilize the environmental energy (EE) extremely, an energy harvesting (EH) circuit techniques were pursued and following results were obtained. (i) An EH CMOS circuit that can convert a weak radio frequency energy to electric power was clarified and its validity was confirmed by fabricating the circuit with a 0.18-um CMOS technology. (ii) In order to charge energy harvested to a storage battery, a high-voltage output dc-dc up-converter is required. A dc-dc up-converter with the COMS technology was studied and the circuit that can output a high voltage exceeding transistor’s breakdown voltage was invented. (iii) An energy generation tree system (EGTS) that is integrated with different kinds of the energy harvesters was suggested to utilize the EE extremely. (iv) Autonomous distributed system controlling technique was clarified for the generic tree energy management. (v) And to implement the EGTS, the circuit and system design environment was built with the circuit simulator, SPICE.

Free Research Field

電気電子工学