A CMOS self-powered monolithic light direction sensor with SAR ADC

A light direction sensor, SAR ADC, and energy harvesting photodiodes are integrated on a single chip based fabricated in a 0.18 μm process. No external power supply is needed for the chip to operate. Micro-scale metal baffles create on-chip shadowing for sensing light direction. The frequency of the SAR ADC automatically varies adapting to the harvested power. A current compensation circuit is presented to improve the precision to 7 ENOB. In addition, the chip works when solar intensity is greater than 45 mW/cm2.

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