CICC 2019 ES1-3 - "Power Management for the Internet of Things" - Patrick P. Mercier

Abstract: Small, ultra-low-power integrated circuits afford new opportunities to sense and interact with the environment in new and exciting ways – for example by sensing quantities like temperature, humidity, or chemical concentrations in the environment or on the human body, by connecting instruments via short- or long-range wireless standards, by probing brain matter across arbitrary 3D geometries, and beyond. In all such applications, small and efficient power management solutions are required. In this presentation, we will discuss design techniques and example implementations of switched-capacitor, single inductor multi-output (SIMO), and hybrid multi-level DC-DC converters that can achieve high efficiency in small sizes. Techniques to achieve high efficiency across wide dynamic power ranges will also be covered. Finally, we will discuss emerging trends on energy harvesting transducers and efficient multi-modal energy harvesting circuit solutions. Biography: Patrick Mercier is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder/co-director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Alberta, Canada, in 2006, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 2008 and 2012, respectively. Prof. Mercier has received numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award in 2018, the Biocom Catalyst Award in 2017, the UCSD Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2015, the Beckman Young Investigator Award in 2015, The Hellman Fellowship Award in 2014, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Jack Kilby Award in 2010, amongst others. He has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers in venues such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, ISSCC (13 papers in the last six years), Advanced Science, and others. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters, is a member of the ISSCC, CICC, and VLSI Technical Program Committees, and has co-edited two books: Power Management Integrated Circuits (CRC Press, 2016), and Ultra-Low-Power Short-Range Radios (Springer, 2015). His research interests include the design of energy-efficient mixed-signal systems, RF circuits, power converters, and sensor interfaces for wearable, medical, and mobile applications.