The great innovations of the last century have ushered continuous progress in many areas of technology, especially in the form of miniaturization of electronic circuits. This progress shows a trend towards consistent decreases in power requirements due to miniaturization. According to the ITRS and industry leaders, such as Intel, the challenge of managing and providing power efficiency still persist as scaling down of devices continues. A variety of power sources can be used in order to provide power to low power applications. Few of these sources have favorable characteristics and can be designed to deliver maximum power such as the novel mini notched turbine used as a source in this work. The MiNT is a novel device that can be used as a feasible energy source when integrated into a system and evaluated for power delivery as investigated in this work. As part of this system, a maximum power point tracking system provides an applicable solution for capturing enhanced power delivery for an energy harvesting system. However, power efficiency and physical size are adversely affected by the characteristics and environment of many energy harvesting systems and must also be addressed. To address these issues, an analysis of mini notched turbine, a RF rectenna, and an enhanced maximum power point tracking system is presented and verified using simulations and measurements. Furthermore, mini notched energy harvesting system, RF rectenna energy harvesting system, and enhanced maximum power point tracking system are developed and experimental data analyzed. The enhanced maximum power point tracking system uses a resistor emulation technique and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to improve the power efficiency and reduce the physical size. This new innovative design improves the efficiency of optimized power management circuitry up to 7% compared to conventional power management circuits over a wide range of input power and range of emulated resistances, allowing more power to be harvested from small energy harvesting sources and delivering it to the load such as smart sensors. In addition, this is the first IC design to be implemented and tested for the patented mini notched turbine (MiNT) energy harvesting device. Another advantage of the enhanced power management system designed in this work is that the proposed approach can be utilized for extremely small energy sources and because of that the proposed work is valid for low emulated resistances. and systems with low load resistance Overall, through the successful completion of this work, various energy harvesting systems can have the ability to provide enhanced power management as the IC industry continues to progress toward miniaturization of devices and systems.

The purpose of this research is to design and integrate a symbiotic notched-turbine energy generator for implantation as a cross-coupled system capable of continuously and perpetually powering an electronic implantable medical device (IMD), which is a device designed to operate inside the body of a higher mammal to enhance, correct or provide the body with a function that has deviated from the norm or has stopped altogether. The list of IMDs available for implantation keeps growing every year, one of the newest being the VBLOC, produced by EnteroMedics®, and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on January 15th, 2015[1], [2] to treat obesity in the United States, in lieu of the more dangerous and costly bariatric surgery widely used to treat the same condition. Some of the more traditional IMDs, such as the cardiac defibrillator, pacemaker, and insulin pumps require the use of a battery system for their operation. The powering of IMDs is a topic of growing importance and as such, the energy released by the hydrodynamic action of the cardiovascular system of a higher mammal is presented in this work as a source of energy that can be converted into electricity by use of a microturbine, loaded with magnetic rings that induce a time-varying magnetic field onto a set of insulated coils through the process of electromagnetic induction (EMI) in accordance with Faraday’s Law. This work goes beyond mere power production and focuses on the process required to integrate this power source with an IMD when it is coupled to the cardiovascular system for drawing hydro-mechanical power for conversion to electricity and to the IMD of choice to xii deliver the conditioned power, thus replicating a symbiotic process. The harvested energy in the form of a time-varying tri-phase sine wave is therefore rectified, conditioned and made available for use to the IMD. The proposed 3-phase generator has a volume of 1.02 cm3 and has the potential to be implemented as a dual or quad system that doubles or quadruples the single generator power capabilities accordingly. The rectifying and conditioning circuits may be housed in a hermetically sealed container, covered with a biocompatible material such as, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) or titanium, which can afford the best implantation properties such as non-absorbability, durability, hardness, and biocompatibility [4]. Additionally, the prevention of blood clotting is of paramount importance in any IMD, which can be helped, for example by treating its surface with Tethered-Liquid Perfluorocarbons (TLP) to prevent biofilm formation of the blood that typically leads to infections and clotting[5].