Energy autonomous sensor systems: State and perspectives of a ubiquitous sensor technology

Recent years have seen a strong focus of the IC research community towards increasing the energy efficiency of electronic systems. This continued effort has involved all kinds of electronic functions: DSPs (reaching the 10W/MMAC according Gene's law), data converters (the FOM of recent ADCs is better than 50fJ/conversion), radios (reaching the level of 3nJ per received-transmitted bit). Exploiting this ever-increasing energy efficiency, the improved battery technology and the advances in energy harvesting, miniaturized electronic sensors that do not need to be recharged for their whole operational life and can communicate to build up an energy-autonomous system are possible nowadays . A working group has been setup by CATRENE1 to study the state and the trends of these "energy autonomous systems". This paper will summarize the findings of the working group, with special attention to sensor applications.