Introduction to design techniques for energy harvesting

An introduction to different design techniques for energy harvesting has been presented. Energy scavenging approaches are now considered real contenders as an alternative for powering ubiquitously deployed mobile and wireless electronic devices such as sensor network nodes. The demand is driven by several factors such as increasing energy costs for medium-to-large systems and the lack of sufficient battery power for ever increasing functionality of small and mobile devices. A photovoltaic-panel based energy harvesting is chosen for the wireless sensor system design. Real-time scheduling algorithms are proposed to assign energy to upcoming tasks in a short-time perspective. The proposed DC-to-DC voltage-level shifter, called ULS, reduces dynamic power and leakage of the analog/mixed signal system-on-a-chips while making their re-configurability easier.