Energy Harvesting and Smart Management Platform for Low Power IoT Systems

Advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and energy scavenging technologies are now able to provide viable solutions based on different application environments. In particular, rechargeable battery-operated Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can now be set upon a new basis that targets both ambient energy harvesting and wireless charging technologies in different forms and scales. Hence, the assumption of finite energy budget (that may also affect the system's performance) can be over-passed by potentially unlimited energy supply. The presented platform is able to effectively power a low power IoT system with processing, sensing and wireless communication capabilities. It embeds an advanced energy management IC that allows extremely high efficiency energy harvesting, suitable for low-power and miniaturized energy generators. Unlike other systems it not only supports a variety of power supply options, but also a hybrid energy storage scheme. This paper aims to provide a description of the system's design, the embedded intelligence and the performance in terms of energy autonomy.