Speaker:

Edith Beigne, LETI, France

Title:

A fully energy-driven Power Management Unit in the scope of future energy harvesting complex systems

Abstract:

Autonomous devices that are self-powered by extracting their energy from their environment are a new opportunity for MPSoC and Wireless Sensor Networks purposes. Leveraging various harvesting techniques, multiple energy sources such as light, thermal gradient, vibrations or motion can be exploited to supply electronic devices. This talk will present an innovative fully energy-driven or Real-Time driven platform that is adaptive to environmental changes and is woken up and controlled according to energy-events or system data-events. Naturally, the global system control is asynchronous and implemented using Quasi-Delay-Insensitive asynchronous logic. Intrinsic advantages of asynchronous circuits for energy harvesting systems are also presented. A full architecture is proposed that benefits from an automatic sleeping mode and a high robustness to voltage variations. Based on energy events, a new power management scheme is proposed and, depending on energy levels, is able to optimize system adaptability to application constraints.

Bio:

Edith Beigné received her Master degree in Microelectronics from Grenoble Polytechnical Institute in 1998. She joined CEA-LETI MINATEC in 1998 first working on RFID systems for biomedical applications. She focused then on asynchronous systems and circuits specifically for ultra low power mixed-signal systems and cryptographic circuits. In 2002, she was in charge of the full design of an asynchronous Network-on-Chip for a complex SoC dedicated to Telecom called FAUST. Since 2005, she is head of the low power design team within the digital laboratory developing fine-grain power control and local voltage and frequency scaling innovative features. Since 2009, her main focus is to manage power and variability issues in advanced technology nodes. She was leading two complex innovative SoC design in 65nm and 32nm technologies for adaptive voltage and frequency scaling architecture based on GALS architectures. Her main focus is today on FDSOI and automatic performance regulations using innovative architectures and, in parallel, she also works since 2009 on energy harvesting systems developing specifically asynchronous energy-driven and event-driven platforms based on her knowledge of asynchronous event-based systems.