IoT-Aimed Power Converter Reduces Resting Power by 50%
MIT researchers have developed a power converter that works over a wide range of currencies and reduces resting power consumption by 50 percent, making it well-suited for the power needs of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, they said.
At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in earlier this year, engineers from MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) demonstrated a new power converter that maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 2,000,000-fold increase.
Power converters take an input voltage and convert it to a steady output voltage. The range in currents of the researchers’ converter is dramatically different than the range of a typical power converter, which is generally in a narrow range of currents. This wide range provides more flexibility for the power considerations of IoT applications, researchers said.
“A large number of IoT applications are severely energy constrained, and long lifetimes are achieved through duty cycling,” explained Anantha Chandrakasan, head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Power-hungry components like radios are used infrequently, while other components like sensors and ADCs are turned on more frequently, and overall the device is in a “sleep/standby” mode for most of the time. Thus, the current consumption can vary by many orders of magnitude. This calls for efficient operation of converters over wide current ranges.”
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