Energy harvesting lets devices use ambient energy from their local environment. This can extend the lifetime of batteries or even do away with them altogether. That’s a plus for the environment, as it reduces waste and the need for raw materials. And it is a plus for users, who spend less time looking for and replacing batteries. Now, a new generation of highly integrated power management ICs (PMICs) deliver multiple features on a single chip to help simplify the design-in of energy harvesting.
A typical energy harvesting system (as shown below ) includes:
- An energy harvester targeting a suitable energy source
- An energy-harvesting PMIC
- A means of storing harvested energy
- A load / application to be powered.
At the heart of the system, the PMIC is responsible for optimizing the performance of the harvester, gathering the harvested energy and routing it to the storage element or direct to the application depending on the requirements at that moment. Hence, it is the key to the performance and cost-efficiency of the entire energy harvesting solution.
A sustainable way to power electronics
Nexperia’s NEH7100 is an ideal choice for cost-effective energy harvesting. This highly integrated, high-performance PMIC allows designers to develop low-power devices with extended battery life or full energy autonomy. In the self-charging remote control example above, the NEH7100 makes it possible to harvest more power than the application consumes. The remote control therefore becomes fully energy autonomous with no battery swaps – enhancing user experience, optimizing product design and further reducing e-waste (see Harvesting sustainable battery power).
What’s more, thanks to its cold-start feature, the NEH7100 offers manufacturers the possibility of creating battery-less products based on supercapacitors. No battery means less consumption of the scarce raw materials needed in battery production.
High-performance energy harvesting at an affordable price
The NEH7100 has an input power range of 15 μW to 100 mW. It converts ambient energy with up to 95% efficiency and features an ultra-fast maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm on-chip that adaptively optimizes the performance of the energy harvester to deliver the maximum output at all times.
Thanks to its unique inductorless design and extensive range of integrated power management features, the NEH7100 helps reduce overall bill of materials (BoM) costs and system complexity. The integrated power management features include:
- Over-voltage protection (OVP) and low-voltage detection (LVD)
- avoid battery damage preventing over-charging and -discharging
- Over-current protection (OCP)
- prevents high currents that could damage the chip
- Adjustable LDO output to power the application
- simplifies system design
Test the NEH7100 in your application
To help designers assess the potential of the NEH7100BU in their application, Nexperia offers the NEVB-NEH7100BU evaluation board (figure 3). The evaluation board allows you to explore the advantages of energy harvesting in general and test the specific performance and features of the NEH7100 PMIC – including USB charging, I2C, LDO regulation, hard code settings and battery protection. It can be used with both DC harvesters and AC harvesters such as piezoelectric or inductive devices, as well as rechargeable batteries or supercapacitors for energy storage.
Complete and versatile, the NEH7100 evaluation board makes it straightforward to evaluate, test and design-in energy harvesting for low-power applications such as wearables, IoT devices and consumer electronics.
For more information, check out our energy harvesting PMICs page.
