Design of a Single-Capacitor-Based Threshold-Adjustable Power Management Circuit for Task-Aware Waste-Minimized Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This paper introduces a power management circuit (PMC) designed for energy-harvesting (EH) based IoT devices. The proposed PMC combines the benefits of single-capacitor-based power storage and a unit with adjustable charging and discharging thresholds. The single-capacitor-based design significantly reduces the area of power storage and its switch transistors compared to conventional multiple-capacitor-based designs. The threshold adjustable unit minimizes the energy wasted in power transmission and provides energy for the useful process in the EH-based IoT device, accelerating the processing. The proposed circuit is implemented using the TSMC 65 nm process. Post-layout simulation results in HSPICE show that the power management circuit occupies only 1.01× of the area of the conventional smallest circuit while reducing the average processing time of the PMC-managed IoT load by 18.8%.