Make Your Own Energy

May 2nd, 2019 – By Ann Steffora Mutschler

Efficient use of power and energy in electric vehicles and smart buildings will require innovative thinking. 

Where it works
Energy harvesting has been important to automotive systems, but not necessarily at the SoC level, said Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP. “In EV and hybrid automotive systems, regenerative braking is common and there’s efforts to harvest vibrational energy using piezoelectric transducer MEMS, but this technology will take a while to become mainstream.”

At the SoC level, the first place Arteris IP saw energy harvesting implemented was in 2014 with TI’s SimpleLink CC26xx energy-sipping IoT chips, which are designed to be powered by a separate MEMS-based power source. Even though these chips are relatively simple SoCs from a processing viewpoint, Shuler stressed that they are hugely complex from a power management standpoint. There are more than 20 different power and voltage domains along with dynamic voltage frequency scaling.

For more information, please download the Arteris FlexNoC Interconnect IP datasheet.

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