Energy Harvesting for Sensor Nodes
Although clearly there is now plenty of room and more need for immediate wsn applications based on available battery technologies or powered from the grid whenever possible, the prospects for battery free or complementary energy harvesting solutions would remarkably help expand future sensor deployment possibilities.
Here is an over-one-year-old interesting presentation by Raj Amirtharajah (Assistant Professor at ECE Dept. UC Davis) delivered at Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium.
In this talk, Raj introduces energy harvesting schemes in the microwatts power range, describes circuit and system microarchitecture techniques to employ ambient energy sources in wireless sensor nodes, and provides specific examples of designing efforts for solar and vibration energy harvesting applications.
The talk then goes into some energy scalable DSP design techniques for sensor platforms with graceful performance degradation on power constrains. Lastly, future trends in this area are discussed.
The video can be seen here (1h 19′) or alternatively download it (128 MB) using this tool.
