2022 journal article
An Ultrasonic Energy Harvesting IC Providing Adjustable Bias Voltage for Pre-Charged CMUT
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.
MeSH headings : Ultrasonics; Ultrasonography; Equipment Design; Transducers; Electric Capacitance
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: December 1, 2022
Ultrasonic wireless power transmission (WPT) using pre-charged capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUT) is drawing great attention due to the easy integration of CMUT with CMOS techniques. Here, we present an integrated circuit (IC) that interfaces with a pre-charged CMUT device for ultrasonic energy harvesting. We implemented an adaptive high voltage charge pump (HVCP) in the proposed IC, which features low power, overvoltage stress (OVS) robustness, and a wide output range. The ultrasonic energy harvesting IC is fabricated in the 180 nm HV BCD process and occupies a 2 × 2.5 mm2 silicon area. The adaptive HVCP offers a 2× – 12× voltage conversion ratio (VCR), thereby providing a wide bias voltage range of 4 V–44 V for the pre-charged CMUT. Moreover, a VCR tunning finite state machine (FSM) implemented in the proposed IC can dynamically adjust the VCR to stabilize the HVCP output (i.e., the pre-charged CMUT bias voltage) to a target voltage in a closed-loop manner. Such a closed-loop control mechanism improves the tolerance of the proposed IC to the received power variation caused by misalignments, amount of transmitted power change, and/or load variation. Besides, the proposed ultrasonic energy harvesting IC has an average power consumption of 35 μW–554 μW corresponding to the HVCP output from 4 V–44 V. The CMUT device with a local surface acoustic intensity of 3.78 mW/mm2, which is well below the FDA limit for power flux (7.2 mW/mm2), can deliver sufficient power to the IC.