Harvesting indoor light to supply power to nomad embedded systems

It is possible to design a system to supply power to low consumption systems (hundreds of µW to tens of mW) from industrial devices. To develop an autonomous system based on harvesting energy from mixed artificial and natural light, it is mandatory to know which solutions are available and suitable to the conditions of use of the system to be designed. In this paper a comparison of solar cells exposed to different indoor light sources is made. This allows to establish which technology is the most relevant to use in different light environments, in terms of power generation. In addition, the difference in behavior between the two most widely produced solar cells, crystallin and amorphous Si, is depicted. We conclude that for new efficient light sources as fluorescent tubes, CFLs and LEDs, amorphous silicon is the best solution to generate power. On the other hand, crystallin silicon is the most efficient under incandescent, halogen or sunlight exposition.