An Efficient Solar Energy Harvester for Wireless Sensor Nodes

Solar harvesting circuits have been recently proposed to increase the autonomy of embedded systems. One key design challenge is how to optimize the efficiency of solar energy collection under non stationary light conditions. This paper proposes a scavenger that exploits miniaturized photovoltaic modules to perform automatic maximum power point tracking at a minimum energy cost. The system adjusts dynamically to the light intensity variations and its measured power consumption is less than 1mW. Experimental results show increments of global efficiency up to 80%, diverging from ideal situation by less than 10%, and demonstrate the flexibility and the robustness of our approach.