A Low Power and Smart Power Unit for Kinetic Self-Sustainable Wearable Devices

A novel trend to achieve long-lifetime or even self-sustainable wearable devices is to exploit energy harvesting from environmental or body energy. Their power management circuits need to be carefully designed to enable a small-size energy-efficient wearable system, supporting multiple power domains ranging from mW in an active mode to nW in sleep modes. This work presents a fully configurable smart power unit suitable for kinetic energy harvesting transducers, Kinetron MGS, enabling self-sustainability for wearable devices. The proposed power management circuit hosts a low power microcontroller to manage the energy harvesting, voltage conversion from batteries, and wake-up circuits to exit low power states automatically. The source and the load power points are decoupled with multiple DC-DC converters aiming to supply loads with adaptive voltage scaling and high reliability. Experimental results using commercial micro-kinetic generators show the flexibility and efficiency of this approach: the proposed power supply unit achieves a quiescent current of 57 nA and a maximum load current of 300 mA, delivered with a harvesting efficiency of 79 %. We evaluate the proposed system with commercial kinetic energy harvesting transducer generating 1.18 mW when worn on the ankle during walking.