Presently, wireless sensor nodes are widely used and the lifetime of the system is becoming the biggest problem with using this technology. As more and more low power products have been used in WSN, energy harvesting technologies, based on their own characteristics, attract more and more attention in this area. But in order to design high energy efficiency, low cost and nearly perpetual lifetime micro energy harvesting system is still challenging. This thesis proposes a new way, by applying three factors of the system, which are the energy generation, the energy consumption and the power management strategy, into a theoretical model, to optimally design a highly efficient micro energy harvesting system in a real environment. In order to achieve this goal, three aspects of contributions, which are theoretically analysis an energy harvesting system, practically enhancing the system efficiency, and real system implementation, have been made. For the theoretically analysis, the generic architecture and the system design procedure have been proposed to guide system design. Based on the proposed system architecture, the theoretical analytical models of solar and thermal energy harvesting systems have been developed to evaluate the performance of the system before it being designed and implemented. Based on the model's findings, two approaches (MPPT based power conversion circuit and the power management subsystem) have been considered to practically increase the system efficiency. As this research has been funded by the two public projects, two energy harvesting systems (solar and thermal) powered wireless sensor nodes have been developed and implemented in the real environments based on the proposed work, although other energy sources are given passing treatment. The experimental results show that the two systems have been efficiently designed with the optimization of the system parameters by using the simulation model. The further experimental results, tested in the real environments, show that both systems can have nearly perpetual lifetime with high energy efficiency.

In this work full parametric analysis of nano antennas is presented. To begin with, optical or electronic properties of noble metals such as gold and copper were studied in details to get a clear understanding of their reaction to an incident electromagnetic wave. Complex frequency dependent dielectric functions indicated that in THz metals acts as a dielectric with significant absorption. Simultaneous optimization of the length and the bow angle of a bow-tie antenna resulted in relative electric field intensity enhancement of 8 orders of magnitude for 0.5nm gap and 4 orders of magnitude for 50nm around 28THz resonance frequency. These results are at least 2 orders of magnitude greater than the published optical antennas. Physical reasons behind field localization and intensity enhancement  are  discussed  in  details.  The  solution  of  Maxwell’s  equations  at   the  interface between metallic nano antenna and air is also present in this piece of research. The derived dispersion relation of surface plasmons shows momentum matching at 28.3 THz between free propagating electromagnetic fields’ modes in air and localized modes at the interface. Consequently, Propagating electromagnetic waves are ensured to couple to localized surface propagating modes producing filed enhancement. The integrated SiO2 matching section is theoretically proven to increase transmission to substrate to 75% (compared to 40% without it) which in turn improves the coupled power by 40 times. Nano antennas were fabricated in house using Electron beam lithography with a precise gap of 50nm. In addition, THz diode was designed, fabricated and integrated to the nano antennas to rectify the enhanced THz signal. The integration of the nano diode required a precise overlap of the two arms of the antenna in the rage of 100nm. In order to overcome two arms overlap fabrication challenges, three layer alignment technique was used to produce precise overlap.The THz rectifier was electrically tested and shown high sensitivity and rectification ability without any bias. Finally, nano antenna integrated diode is under optical testing using a 10.6μm Co2 laser at Electro-Optics Lab, Prince Sultan Advanced Technologies Research Institute (PSATRI), King Saud University due to the unavailability of the measurement setup in KAUST.