Analysis and Design of a Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System With Reconfigurable Array of Thermoelectric Generators for IoT Applications

In this paper, a novel thermoelectric energy harvesting system with a reconfigurable array of thermoelectric generators (TEGs), which requires neither an inductor nor a flying capacitor, is proposed. The proposed architecture can accomplish maximum power point tracking (MPPT) and voltage conversion simultaneously via the reconfiguration of the TEG array, and demonstrate significantly improved power conversion efficiency over the conventional switching converter and switched-capacitor architectures. Two systematical scaling approaches- powers-of-two scaling and maximum-factor scaling-are presented and analyzed to serve as the design guideline, catering for reconfigurable TEG arrays of different sizes. In order to optimize the chip area required, a custom-designed, multi-level hierarchy and systematically scalable switch array that requires a reasonable number of switches is also developed to enable the reconfiguration of the TEG array. The 16-node and 12-node versions of the proposed system have been implemented in a standard 0.35-μm CMOS process. Measurement results verify the analysis, and confirm that the proposed system can maintain a higher than 88.8% efficiency over a wide range of temperature gradients.