Date of Award
12-1-2014
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
First Advisor
WANG, HAIBO
Abstract
This research investigates lower-power lower-voltage analog circuit techniques suitable for wireless sensor applications. Wireless sensors have been used in a wide range of applications and will become ubiquitous with the revolution of internet of things (IoT). Due to the demand of low cost, miniature desirable size and long operating cycle, passive wireless sensors which don't require battery are more preferred. Such sensors harvest energy from energy sources in the environment such as radio frequency (RF) waves, vibration, thermal sources, etc. As a result, the obtained energy is very limited. This creates strong demand for low power, lower voltage circuits. The RF and analog circuits in the wireless sensor usually consume most of the power. This motivates the research presented in the dissertation. Specially, the research focuses on the design of a low power high efficiency regulator, low power Resistance to Digital Converter (RDC), low power Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) with parasitic error reduction and a low power low voltage Low Dropout (LDO) regulator. This dissertation includes a low power analog circuit design for the RFID wireless sensor which consists of the energy harvest circuits (an optimized rectifier and a regulator with high current efficiency) and a sensor measurement circuit (RDC), a single end sampling SAR ADC with no error induced by the parasitic capacitance and a digital loop LDO whose line and load variation response is improved. These techniques will boost the design of the wireless sensor and they can also be used in other similar low power design.
Access
This dissertation is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.