Versatile new buck-boost ICs for highly efficient energy harvesting

E-peas offers two new devices adding complementary features to earlier released products. The AEM10330 and AEM30330 PMICs differentiate themselves from the competition through their innovative buck-boost architecture. They claim to deal with far lower battery voltages than other solutions on the market. Additionally, the high-speed charging of super-capacitors that these ICs can supervise provides more energy to be made available to the load – producing greater flexibility when selecting the storage device. The AEM10330 is particularly intended for solar deployments, while the AEM30330 is aimed at RF/vibration-oriented deployments (including home automation, industrial, asset tracking and aftermarket automotive monitoring systems and retail applications).

One of the main characteristics of both devices is the cold-start threshold at which they begin to draw energy from the surrounding environment. This has been reduced to just 275mV/3µW, which presents a real improvement on the earlier generation of e-peas PMICs - and is claimed to be unmatched by any other solution currently available.

The new PMICs can provide up to 60mA, so storage elements can be charged rapidly. By utilising the fully configurable MPPT function, the devices can continuously monitor and regulate the input with a fast refresh rate of 20ms supported. Therefore, the extraction efficiency of the system can be kept as high as possible, despite variations in the input from the source.

These PMICs have a working temperature range covering -40C to 125C. They are supplied in compact 40-pin QFN packages and need only four components to accompany them. This translates into a solution with an ultra-low BOM which takes up little board space.

“Since the release of the initial AEM series PMICs, e-peas has been differentiating itself from the other players in the energy harvesting sector through products with superior performance levels, alongside exceptional application knowledge,” says Christian Ferrier, chief marketing officer at e-peas. “With these latest additions to the series, we are significantly increasing the pervasiveness of our technology, allowing a broader variety of use cases to benefit from it.”