Bringing Robustness and Power Efficiency to Autonomous Energy-Harvesting Microsystems

Editors' note:Asynchronous circuits are well-suited to ultra-low-power design. This article presents a microsystem that is powered only by energy extracted from the environment to implement an autonomous sensing application. Key to this application is the use of asynchronous logic, which not only provides greater energy efficiency due to its event-driven nature but, more importantly, allows graceful adaptation to highly variable power availability.—Montek Singh (UNC Chapel Hill) and Luciano Lavagno (Politecnico di Torino)