A Fully Integrated Counter Flow Energy Reservoir for Peak Power Delivery in Small Form-Factor Sensor Systems

We present a fully integrated energy reservoir unit using a counter flow method for peak power delivery in space-constrained sensor systems. Recent advances in circuits have enabled significant reduction in the size of wireless systems such as implantable biomedical devices. As a consequence, the batteries integrated in these systems have also shrunk, resulting in high internal resistances (~10 kQ). However, the peak current requirement of power-hungry components such as radios remains in the milliwatt range and hence cannot directly be supplied from the battery. Therefore, an energy reservoir with high output power but small size is required. We present an efficient energy reservoir that dynamically reconfigures a storage capacitor array using a so-called counter flow approach. By creating a voltage gradient on capacitor arrays and moving the capacitors along the slope of the gradient, the supply voltage can be maintained while the energy stored in the reservoir is delivered efficiently to the load. The counter flow energy reservoir delivers 65% of stored energy before recharging is needed which allows up to a 12× reduction in overall capacitor size compared with our implementation of the previous method. The design supplies up to 13.6-mW output power for 1 μs. We demonstrate the proposed concept with a pulsed radio, showing an 11.5× increase in pulse length compared with the previous method.