TY - JOUR
T1 - A CMOS Timer-Injector Integrated Circuit for Self-Powered Sensing of Time-of-Occurrence
AU - Zhou, Liang
AU - Aono, Kenji
AU - Chakrabartty, Shantanu
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 6, 2017; revised November 16, 2017; accepted January 7, 2018. Date of publication January 30, 2018; date of current version April 23, 2018. This paper was approved by Associate Editor Dennis Sylvester. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant ECCS-1550096, Grant DGE-0802267, and Grant DGE-1143954. (Corresponding author: Shantanu Chakrabartty.) L. Zhou and K. Aono are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130 USA.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1966-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Self-powered sensing of the time-of-occurrence of an event is challenging, because it requires access to a reliable time reference or a synchronized clock. In this paper, we propose for the first time a self-powered integrated circuit that is capable of time-stamping asynchronous mechanical events of interest. The core of the proposed design is the integration of two self-powered modules: 1) a chip-scale Fowler-Nordheim tunneling-based timer array, for generating a precision, relative time reference; and 2) a linear piezoelectricity-driven hot-electron injector acting as a floating-gate memory to record the onset of mechanical events. This paper presents measured results from a 4 \times 4 fully programmable timer array system-on-chip (SoC) and a linear injector array SoC, both of which have been prototyped in a standard double-poly CMOS process. The synchronization error of the timer array with respect to an external software clock was measured to be less than 1% over a duration of 100 h, and the average accuracy in sensing the time-of-occurrence of the event was measured to be 6.9%. The minimum activation energy of the self-powered system was measured to be 840 nJ (measured for event durations of 1 s), which is significantly lower than the energy that can be harvested from typical mechanical impacts.
AB - Self-powered sensing of the time-of-occurrence of an event is challenging, because it requires access to a reliable time reference or a synchronized clock. In this paper, we propose for the first time a self-powered integrated circuit that is capable of time-stamping asynchronous mechanical events of interest. The core of the proposed design is the integration of two self-powered modules: 1) a chip-scale Fowler-Nordheim tunneling-based timer array, for generating a precision, relative time reference; and 2) a linear piezoelectricity-driven hot-electron injector acting as a floating-gate memory to record the onset of mechanical events. This paper presents measured results from a 4 \times 4 fully programmable timer array system-on-chip (SoC) and a linear injector array SoC, both of which have been prototyped in a standard double-poly CMOS process. The synchronization error of the timer array with respect to an external software clock was measured to be less than 1% over a duration of 100 h, and the average accuracy in sensing the time-of-occurrence of the event was measured to be 6.9%. The minimum activation energy of the self-powered system was measured to be 840 nJ (measured for event durations of 1 s), which is significantly lower than the energy that can be harvested from typical mechanical impacts.
KW - Floating-gate
KW - piezo-floating-gate sensors
KW - self-powered systems
KW - time reference
KW - time-of-occurrence
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041399764&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/JSSC.2018.2793531
DO - 10.1109/JSSC.2018.2793531
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041399764
SN - 0018-9200
VL - 53
SP - 1539
EP - 1549
JO - IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits
JF - IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits
IS - 5
ER -