Power Management System for Ultra Low Power Sensor Application

Seunghyun Lee, Mingoo Seok

Abstract

For sensor applications, ultra low power operation has been a key concern because most of them depend on battery for power source. There have been active researches on how to develop VLSI systems which consume ultra low power[1][2]. Especially one of the most state-of-art microprocessors for sensor application boasts hundreds nW for active time and tens pW for sleep time, which envisions multi-year lifetime without replacing battery. [Phoenix, not published yet, UM-AnnArbor] However its ultra low power consumption makes it difficult to use exiting techniques for power supply system, i.e. regulator and so on. Further the wide chasm of power between sleep and active time exacerbates the difficulty. Therefore in this project, we propose a power system to supply the required power efficiently.

Because the whole topic is too big to be completed in a limited time, we proposed one of the essential parts in the whole picture, which are a LDO regulator and a reference generator for it. Their primary objective is to supply stable voltage to the target microprocessor over reasonable range of temperature and battery voltage fluctuation. Additionally power consumption is a key concern as well, because the power budget of the whole system is extremely small.

References

  1. A. Wang, A. Chandrakasan, "A 180-mV subthreshold FFT processor using a minimum energy design methodology," IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol.40, no.1, pp.310-319, Jan 2005.
  2. S. Hanson, B. Zhai, M. Seok, B. Cline, K. Zhou, M. Singhal, M. Minuth, J. Olson, L. Nazhandali, T. Austin, D. Sylvester, D. Blaauw, "Performance and variability optimization strategies in a sub-200mV, 3.5pJ/Inst, 11nW Subthreshold Processor," Symposium on VLSI circuits, pp 152-153, 2007.

Files