A Wireless-Interface SoC Powered by Energy Harvesting for Short-range Data Communication

This paper describes the design and estimation of a wireless-interface SoC for wireless battery-less mouse with short-range data communication capability. It comprises an RF transmitter and microcontroller. An SoC, which is powered by an electric generator that exploits gyration energy by dragging the mouse, was fabricated using the TSMC 0.18-mum CMOS process. Features of the SoC are the adoption of a simple FSK modulation scheme, a single-end configuration on the RF transmitter, and the specific microcontroller design for mouse operation. We verified that the RF transmitter can perform data communication with a 1-m range at 2.17 mW, and the microcontroller consumes 0.03 mW at 1 MHz, which shows that the total power consumption in the SoC is 2.2 mW. This is sufficiently low for the SoC to operate with energy harvesting