A 595pW 14pJ/Cycle Microcontroller with Dual-Mode Standard Cells and Self-Startup for Battery-Indifferent Distributed Sensing

📋 论文概要

该论文提出了一种峰值功耗仅595pW、每周期能耗14pJ的超低功耗微控制器，通过双模式标准单元和自启动技术，解决了电池无关分布式传感器节点在电池能量间歇可用时依赖微弱收集能量持续工作的问题。

💡 主要创新点

• 提出双模式标准单元，在活动模式和睡眠模式下动态切换，大幅降低静态和动态功耗。
• 集成自启动电路，使微控制器能从亚阈值收集能量中自动启动，无需外部唤醒信号。

📄 原文摘要

Battery-indifferent sensor nodes require continuous operation in spite of the intermittently available battery energy, and hence require low peak-power operation to fit the fluctuating power made available by the harvester when the battery is out of energy (Fig. 2.6.1). Such harvested power can be very limited (e.g., nW and below) in aggressively miniaturized systems in the millimeter scale, and is typically well below the leakage consumption of the circuit being powered. Recently, purely harvested continuous operation with an on-chip harvester with sub-leakage sub-nW minimum power has been demonstrated for battery-less operation [1], at the cost of drastically lower performance (i.e., clock frequency in the Hz range) and larger energy. On the other hand, conventional miniaturized sensor nodes pursue minimum energy per operation to maximize the battery lifetime [2-6], but are not able to operate in the sub-leakage regime, and are hence

👥 作者与机构

Longyang Lin, Saurabh Jain, Massimo Alioto

National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore