An IoT Sensor Node SoC with Dynamic Power Scheduling for Sustainable Operation in Energy Harvesting Environment

This paper describes a low-power IoT sensor node SoC that can be used for factory automation and wearable healthcare applications. It features dynamic power scheduling method suitable for the environment that works with an energy harvester. Our proposed SoC architecture is composed of a low power (60 nA) RTC, a normally-off RF which has fast start-up time (0.5 µs), and other low-power components. A mixed-signal SoC has been fabricated using the TSMC 65 nm LP process. The sensor node system equipped with dynamic power scheduling consumes about 3.4 µW when the activity ratio is 0.1%. Evaluation results show that the proposed method can reduce about 51% of the power consumption compared with the case without dynamic power scheduling in sensor node SoC. Also, the parameters of the system in energy harvesting environment can be adjusted under the trade-off with power consumption and measurement accuracy according to the application requirements.