Dissertation in the field of Microelectronic circuit design, Shailesh Singh Chouhan
The title of thesis is CMOS integrated circuits for RF powered wireless temperature sensor
Map © OpenStreetMap. Some rights reserved.
The proliferations in the utility of wireless networks have placed an increasing demand of usage of wireless sensor nodes. It is impractical to replace the battery of each sensor node if nodes are spanned over a huge geographical area. As the result, researchers are looking for alternative solutions to obtain energy for these nodes from ambient sources. However, the limited energy density of these sources requires low power solutions for the implementation. Thus, the focal point of this
research work is to the design and development of the CMOS components required to implement RF energy harvesting based systems or wireless sensor node. In this work, three basic building blocks of a wireless sensor node have been considered which are the energy harvester unit, the power management unit and finally, processing and application unit. In the energy harvesting unit, the emphasis was put on over the designing of an efficient RF-to-DC converter unit. Different techniques
have been proposed to improve the power conversion performance of the existing RF-energy converters. Second, low power reference circuits are proposed which are useful in power management block and in timing signal generation purposes. These reference circuits provide voltage, current and frequency signals, irrespective of change in supply voltage and temperature so that the power management unit works uninterruptedly. Finally, the temperature sensors were developed for the application unit. The proposed temperature sensors measure temperature with moderate accuracies. The proposed circuits have been demonstrated in prototype designs, verified with simulations and experiments. They make the designing of the wireless sensor node more resourceful, power efficient and more suitable for IoT based applications.
Opponent: Professor Catherine Dehollain, EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland
Supervisor: Professor Kari Halonen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Micro- and Nanosciences
Contact information:
Shailesh Singh Chouhan
shailesh.chouhan@aalto.fi