Design of a Precision, Self-Powered Time-Keeping Device using Coupled Fowler-Nordheim Tunneling

Self-powered clocks and time-keeping devices provide an ability to synchronize events across passive internet-of-things and tags that are spatially separated from each other. In this regard, Fowler-Nordheim tunneling based self-powered timers have been shown to reliably track time with an operating life-cycle greater than 2 years. However, the synchronization accuracy of a single FN-timer is determined by the variations in timer-device artifacts which could only be partially mitigated using ensemble averaging. In this paper, we propose a novel capacitively coupled network of FN-tunneling timers that can significantly improve the accuracy in presence of both timer-device and coupling capacitor mismatch. Using Monte-carlo simulations, we show that by choosing an appropriate size of the coupled network, the synchronization accuracy of the timekeeping device can be increased by a factor of 20dB.