Improving latency time of an energy harvesting chain by implementing a fully-integrated-LDO for aircraft WSN

This paper presents an energy harvesting system to reduce the mass of the cables within an aircraft, focusing on the development of a power conversion chain to harvest energy from data lines, which is eventually used to supply the aircraft sensors or wireless monitoring. This proposed interface harvests energy from data CAN bus without disturbing the data transmission, providing an output current up to 60 mA and an output voltage of 1.65 V at the output of the fully-integrated-LDO and an output voltage of 5.035 V at the output of the charge pump within a very short settling time of less than 5 ms and a low voltage ripple of 158.2 mV, in order to feed the aircraft sensors. The most common energy harvester sources are solar cells, wind turbines, vibration energy and thermoelectric generators. The energy harvesting chain (EHC), which does not depend on the environment, is composed by fast analogue devices that are based on integrating a fully-integrated-LDO with a fast transient response, in order to make the aircraft sensors self-powered and operate in real time. The harvesting system is designed in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the simulation results prove the advantage of the proposed architecture.