Effects of Deposition Process on Poly-Si Microscale Energy Harvesting Systems: A Simulation Study

In this paper, the feasibility of a low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) microscale energy harvester for a wireless sensor node is investigated. For that purpose, two device-level models for the LTPS solar cell and thin-film transistors are proposed and employed in system-level evaluation of an energy harvesting system. The results of our analysis indicate that: 1) the maximum power operating point for the solar cell is different when connected to a lossy power converter; 2) increasing the average grain size of the LTPS film can reduce the circuit area by 20 times, while increasing the output power by 6%; and 3) the proposed bottom-up approach enables the designers to identify system bottlenecks and improve the performance accordingly.