Doctoral theses of the School of Electrical Engineering are available in the open access repository maintained by Aalto, Aaltodoc.
Public defence in Micro- and Nanoelectronic Circuit Design, M.Sc. Dipesh Monga
Public defence from the Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering
When
–
Where
AS2
Event language(s)
English
The title of the thesis: Ultra-Low Power Circuits for Batteryless Energy Harvesting Systems and Thermal Compensation in Resistive In-Memory Computing
Thesis defender: Dipesh Monga
Opponent: Prof. Herve Barthelemy, University of Sud-Toulon-Var, France
Custos: Prof. Kari Halonen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering
Embedded systems, ranging from wearable health monitors to implantable diagnostics and environmental sensor nodes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern life. These platforms are often expected to operate continuously under severe energy constraints, where frequent battery replacement is impractical. To address this, there is a growing need for ultra-low-power (ULP) circuits capable of harvesting ambient energy from sources such as radio frequency (RF) fields, biochemical reactions, and photovoltaic cells. Ensuring stable operation under these limited and varying energy conditions requires circuits with ULP consumption and robust performance under variations.
This thesis presents an approach to the design, implementation, and experimental validation of ULP integrated circuits across multiple circuit blocks, tailored for energy-autonomous and flexible systems. The contributions span several key building blocks of energy-harvesting systems, including variation-insensitive voltage and current reference generators, RF-DC converters, low-dropout (LDO) regulators, and switched-capacitor (SC) DC-DC converters with fine-grained, arithmetic progression-based voltage scaling. Further, the work introduces thermal compensation techniques to maintain computational accuracy for analog in-memory computing units under varying thermal conditions.
The circuits presented in this thesis are designed and fabricated using a conventional CMOS in 65 nm and pragmatic 600 nm flexible indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) based technology using unipolar TFT-based transistors. The results can be applied in wearable health monitors, implantable medical devices, environmental sensors, and flexible or disposable electronics. By enabling devices to function independently of batteries, this works paves the way for more sustainable, maintenance-free, and user-friendly technologies in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and beyond.
Thesis available for public display 7 days prior to the defence at .
Doctoral theses of the School of Electrical Engineering
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