Microcontroller-based power management for nanowatt and microwatt energy harvesters

In low power energy harvesting applications the power generated can be in the order of microwatts or lower. At this level, the power management becomes essential for operation. This work proposes an approach to perform power management based on carefully timed analogue-to-digital conversions performed by a microcontroller. This approach is in contrast to the typical approaches based around comparators used for monitoring the voltage of a buffer capacitor. The results of this work demonstrate the power consumption required for performing power management tasks can be reduced to only 100nW. This power consumption compares to dedicated ASIC solutions.