IEA: An Intermittent Energy Aware Platform for Ultra-Low Powered Energy Harvesting WSN

Energy harvesting (EH) technology largely broadens the range of applications of WSN and extends the life circle thereof. As the energy is unpredictable, the operation of energy harvesting WSN is often intermittent, maybe under the lowest working voltage in most of the time. At this point, the power dissipation may be much larger than that of sleep mode, which will waste energy and prolong the network latency time, whereas the current researches have not attempted to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose a general intermittent energy aware EH-WSN platform (IEA), along with the energy management circuit to switch the power supply automatically without any software, which is capable to decrease the quiescent current below 0.5 uA in undervoltage situation, and takes usage of Ferroelectric RAM to reduce the reboot energy for minimizing the energy dissipation. Besides, integral circuit is firstly used to realize the ultra-low power measurement. Extensive experiments have been performed to verify that the power of IEA in low voltage is at least 55 times lower than that of the current platforms for improving the energy efficiency significantly.