News Description

The Microsystems Chair of the Louvain School of Engineering invites you cordially to the following seminar:

“Prometheus (un)chained – Micro Energy Technologies for Energy-Autonomous Micro-Embedded Systems”

By Prof. Peter Woias from Albert-Ludwig-University Freiburg, Depf. of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK), Laboratory for Design of Microsystems, Freiburg, Germany

Where and when

Thursday March the 26th at 9.00 AM, Auditorium SUD 13, Place Croix du
Sud, Louvain-la-Neuve.

Abstract

Distributed and embedded (micro)systems have penetrated almost every area of our daily living. Examples are the steadily growing numbers of MEMS devices in cars, distributed sensor and actuator systems in buildings and industrial fabrication, distributed MEMS devices in medical care and, recently, MEMS-RFID tags in transport and logistics.

Micro Energy Harvesting, i.e. the tapping of ambient energy, promises a much better approach for operating such a widely distributed system away from power grids and batteries.

We do this in the macro world by employing wind, solar or water power as "renewable" forms of energy, with all associated problems like varying energy supply, the need to bridge power-down phases and the environmentally friendly design of the power stations.
However, these challenges do even multiply if we tackle the field of "micro energy harvesting". Micro energy converters have to be provided with a size and function compatible to the respective application site. The varying availability of ambient energy will require an efficient intermediate storage, as the back-up power grid is not available. An efficient energy management has to transfer the electrical energy between all subsystems in an optimal way. Finally, the energy consumption of the system node itself has to be minimized to a high extent. In the last consequence, the concept of an energy-autonomous microsystem will also change the operation philosophy of distributed and embedded systems. We will have to shift from today's "function first" operation strategy to a strict "energy first" paradigm. For that purpose we will have to consider novel control and management strategies, e.g. by using probability procedures in the central control station ("When is node x likely to give a message ?"), power-efficient wake-up strategies for individual nodes, a power-saving data transfer in the distributed system, e.g. by node hopping and, last, redundant system control strategies that are tolerant against the brown-out of individual nodes.
Despite the complexity of this venture the reward would be manifold. We would have "quasi-living" systems at hand that operate with an unprecedented level of autonomy and reliability in almost every daily environment, at remote sites and without a technical service.

In this talk the fundamental differences between today's power supply concepts and the supply requirements of our growing distributed information network will be outlined first. Second, the wide variety of energy harvesting concepts conceivable today will be discussed in a brief overview. Finally, the presentation will describe various application scenarios of EAMES in almost every area of our daily living.