Development of energy management integrated circuits for any-many-multi micro energy harvesting

Project Information

HarvestAll

Grant agreement ID: 871747

DOI

10.3030/871747

Project closed

EC signature date 31 October 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 31 July 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 3 120 556,25

EU contribution

€ 2 184 389,38

Coordinated by

TRAMETO LIMITED
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - HarvestAll (Development of energy management integrated circuits for any-many-multi micro energy harvesting)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2022-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Many market leaders in the internet of things (IoT) predicted that the IoT will begin to free itself from battery power. Without reducing the reliance on battery power, there is a significant roadblock in reaching trillions of IoT devices.
Future devices will need to be self-sufficient and operate without any battery swaps or any human intervention for decades. This will be made possible through the harvesting of all the available ambient energy in the environment. Examples include thermal energy associated with static and dynamic temperature differences; vibrational energy from vehicles driving over a bridge or oil following through a pipe; and light energy from indoor artificial lighting.
The current barrier is micro-energy harvesting systems that can effectively capture all available energy using just one energy management device. The technical challenge is that each type of energy harvester has widely different electrical characteristics that must be managed. Photovoltaic and thermoelectric harvesters are low-voltage DC, resistive, “trickle” sources; electrodynamic harvesters are high-voltage, inductive, “pulsed” sources whilst piezoelectric harvesters are high-voltage AC, capacitive, “bursty” sources.
Trameto is now developing the HarvestAll® energy management integrated circuit (EMIC). HarvestAll® overcomes this challenge and enables energy harvesting from any-single harvester type, many identical harvesters and multiple-different harvester types.
The aim of this project is to deliver HarvestAll®, as samples for evaluation internally and by selected customers; to feed into pre-production EMIC sample development. The project will develop an EMIC that can be adopted into new systems and be specified as part of third-party reference designs. The project has two key deliverables to achieve this aim: firstly, to develop HarvestAll as an engineering sample and secondly to subsequently develop HarvestAll® to TRL8 and pre-production status.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have translated the latest market intelligence, customer needs & feedback into a market requirements document, specification and technical datasheet for HarvestAll.

In order to deliver HarvestAll, we have evaluated and selected device manufacturers and supply chain partners with the capacity to scale to millions of units per quarter at a cost that meets our target for the cost of goods sold at high volume. Today agreements and contracts have been signed with leading supply chain partners, including wafer aggregators, device manufacturers, and device packaging companies. In addition, we have signed licence agreements with EDA tool providers.

We have designed and manufactured pre-production samples of HarvestAll-PP. This device has been manufactured by our manufacturing partner via the use of a multi-project wafer to mitigate engineering and financial risk. We received samples from our manufacturing partner in April 2022.

Work has been completed on the specification, the test environment and design for a bring-up board to test HarvestAll-PP. This has allowed us to complete characterisation testing of the samples of HarvestAll-PP. Characterisation results showed that HarvestAll-PP can harvest energy over a wide range of source voltages and impedances. Importantly, the device has been shown to harvest energy at very low impedance.

We have completed work on the development of customer-facing collateral. This has led to collaboration agreements along with joint reference designs with lead partners to support market engagement and drive business development. To date, Trameto has several ongoing relationships with many leading technology providers in the field of energy harvesting.

At the end of the project, Trameto received the first purchase orders for HarvestAll products.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

With billions of sensors being installed into IoT networks around the globe every year, many of them beyond the reach of power grids, batteries are being deployed at an alarming rate. It’s alarming because most of them contain poisonous chemicals, most commonly lithium, posing a contamination threat of enormous proportions.

HarvestAll will eliminate the need for battery replacements in sensor systems that would otherwise be powered using primary batteries. Aligned with growth of IoT sensors to >1 trillion over the next 20 years, there will be a rapid growth in demand for batteries given the need for these sensors to be wireless. By 2024, 62B connected sensors are forecast. Postulating half are primary battery powered, and half of these require a battery change per year, this creates demand for an additional 16B batteries/year (or 64M battery changes per working day). If these were CR2032 batteries containing 0.1g of Lithium, an additional 1.6k tonnes/year of Lithium would need to be mined.

An estimated 15B battery are disposed of around the world annually. Reducing the number of batteries sent to landfill will have a substantial environmental impact. For example, leaching from landfill of perchlorates (Lithium primary batteries12) or increased pH (alkaline batteries13) into the environment is highly damaging. Eliminating the ‘truck rolls’ required to service 64M battery replacements per day delivers environmental benefits through reduced vehicle emissions; a van emits an average of ~2,500kg CO2/year

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