Design and Analysis of Energy Efficient OPAMP for Rectifier in MicroScale Energy Harvesting (Solar Energy)

Abstract

The physical process by which the energy is gathered from the surrounding environment is called energy harvesting. For several micro-scale electronic systems, electrical energy harvested from the sunlight proves to be an attractive and feasible solution. The paper presents the energy efficient design of OPAMP which is in conjunction with the one of the most important integral component of electrical interface known as rectifier, an AC–DC converter. A high gain OPAMP is proposed to harvest the maximum electrical energy obtained from the AC–DC energy converter, since the electrical signal obtained lies within few millivolts as a result it needs the amplification to provide startup voltage for the high end electronic applications. In this work a detailed analysis has been done between two designs of OPAMP one is high gain OPAMP design and other is design of OPAMP with current buffer compensation technique targeted to maximize the power extraction from the converters. Both the designs are implemented in 180 nm technology, whereas high gain design OPAMP operates at 1.2 V and another design of OPAMP operates at 1.8 V. The gain reported by the high gain OPAMP design is 95.41 dB with the power efficiency of 188 nW and current buffer compensation technique OPAMP is 90.71 dB with the power efficiency of 244 nW.