e-peas AEM10941 Solar Energy Harvesting IC

11 October, 2020

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e-peas AEM10941 Solar Energy Harvesting IC is an integrated Ambient Energy Manager (AEM) that can extract DC power from up to 7-cell solar panels, simultaneously storing energy in a rechargeable element and supplying the system with two independent regulated voltages. The AEM10941 is designed to extend battery lifetime and ultimately eliminate the primary energy storage element in a large range of wireless applications, such as industrial monitoring, geolocation, home automation, health monitoring, and wireless sensor nodes.

The AEM10941 harvests the available input current up to 110mA. It integrates an ultra-low power boost converter to charge a storage element, such as a Li-ion battery, a thin ﬁlm battery, a supercapacitor, or a conventional capacitor. The boost converter operates with input voltage in a range from 50mV to 5V. With its unique cold-start circuit, the AEM10941 can start operating with empty storage elements at an input voltage as low as 380mV and input power as low as 3µW.

The low-voltage supply of the AEM10941 can be used to drive a microcontroller at 1.2V or 1.8V. The high-voltage supply may typically drive a radio transceiver at a conﬁgurable voltage between 1.8V and 4.1V. Both are driven by highly-eﬃcient LDO (Low Dropout) regulators for low noise and high stability.

Features

Ultra-low-power start-up
- Cold start from 380mV input voltage and 3µW input power (typical)
Ultra-low-power boost regulator
- Open-circuit voltage sensing for MPPT every 5s
- Configurable MPPT with 2-pin programming
- Selectable V_oc ratios of 70, 75, 85, or 90%
- Input voltage operation range from 50mV to 5V
- MPPT voltage operation range from 50mV to 5V
Integrated 1.2V/1.8V LDO regulator
- Up to 20mA load current
- Power gated dynamically by an external control
- Selectable output voltage
Integrated 8V to 4.1V LDO regulator
- Up to 80mA load current with 300mV drop-out
- Power gated dynamically by an external control
- Selectable output voltage
Flexible energy storage management
- Selectable overcharge and over-discharge protection for any type of rechargeable battery or capacitor
- Fast supercapacitor charging
- Warns the load when the battery is running low
- Warns when output voltage regulators are available
Optional primary battery
- Automatically switches to the primary battery when the secondary battery is exhausted
Integrated balun for dual-cell supercapacitor
Small footprint, small BOM
- Compact 5mm x 5mm QFN28 package
- Only seven passive external components required

The AEM10941 integrates all the active elements for powering a typical wireless sensor. Only five capacitors and two inductors are required, available in the small 0402 and 0603 sizes, respectively. With only seven external components, integration is maximum, footprint and BOM are minimum, optimizing the time-to-market and the costs of wireless sensor node designs.