JOURNAL OF RENEWABLE AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY 1, 062701 2009

Wearable electronics self-powered by using human body heat: The state of the art and the perspective
Vladimir Leonov1,a and Ruud J. M. Vullers2,b
1

Smart Systems and Energy Technology Unit, Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC), Kapeldreef 75, 3001 Leuven, Belgium 2 Smart Systems and Energy Technology Unit, IMEC/Holst Centre, High Tech Campus 31, Eindhoven 5656 AE, The Netherlands Received 29 July 2009; accepted 6 October 2009; published online 6 November 2009

In this paper, we present our vision of what kind of wearable devices and how they can be powered by the heat of human beings and by using ambient light. The basic principles of designing body-powered devices and ways of their hybridizing with photovoltaic cells are discussed. The mechanisms of thermoregulation in humans and the laws of thermodynamics enable placing a distinct boarder between realistic targets and the science ction. These allow prediction of application areas for wearable energy harvesters accounting for competitive batteries with long service life. The existing family of body-powered wearable devices and new technologies for thermopiles are discussed. The theory and practice point at the necessity of using microelectronic and microelectromechanical system technologies for the target application area. These technologies for thermopiles offer the possibility of reduced production cost. Therefore, autonomous systems powered thermoelectrically could be successfully marketed. The related aspects of design and fabrication are discussed. 2009 American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3255465

I. WHAT IS AN ENERGY HARVESTER

An energy harvester or an energy scavenger is a small power generator that uses energy available in the ambient, such as electromagnetic energy, wind, water ow, or a temperature gradient. These sources are the same as those used in power plants or smaller power generators such as the ones for powering houses in remote locations, light towers, spacecrafts, and on transport except those based on fossil fuels . There are also microgenerators in the research stage, which are to replace wiring and batteries in autonomous and stand-alone devices or in devices that are difcult to access. Energy harvesters are being developed for the same purpose. An energy harvester is typically from several to 1 cm size power microplant, which does not require fossil fuel but converts into electricity any primary energy that is available in the ambient for free. The reason to call them harvesters is a new application area: they are used for powering small devices such as sensors or sensor nodes. This way of powering them eliminates the need for cost-ineffective work such as wiring or either recharging or replacing batteries. Despite the fact that plenty of microgenerators being developed worldwide are frequently called scavengers or harvesters, not all of them are truly the ones. Probably, a miniature turbine in a pipe cannot be called such as far as it introduces unwanted pressure drop. Therefore, to compensate for this drop, the pressure at the pump station must be proportionally increased. Thereby, such a turbine works actually as an ineffective converter of the energy spent by the pump station into energy produced by the turbine.

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: leonov@imec.be. Tel.: 32 16-281-576. Electronic mail: vullersr@imec-nl.nl. 1, 062701-1

32 16-288-367. FAX:

1941-7012/2009/1 6 /062701/14/$25.00

2009 American Institute of Physics

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The same is referred to a small dynamo or another converter of mechanical energy into electricity. Such generator requires additional power, e.g., a cyclist spends more efforts if he/she switches the bikes dynamo on. Converting the temperature differences available in the ambient can be safely called energy harvesting unless it adversely affects humans themselves or the other objects built or used by mankind. For example, the outer and inner wall surfaces of buildings have a temperature difference. A thermopile connected in between those two surfaces would generate energy; however, such thermopile would cause additional heat exchange between the two surfaces. Therefore, this way of power generation would require increasing the heating/cooling power of the home facilities by a coefcient of 1001000 more than the power gained. Due to physical interaction of a microgenerator with ambient objects/subjects, it always affects them to some extent. We arrive to the conclusion that a true energy harvester is not only a microgenerator that uses energy available in the ambient. It also does not consume sensible amount of primary energy required in a host/neighbor object/subject so there is no need to compensate for any adverse effect caused by the harvester.
II. THE HISTORY OF ENERGY HARVESTING FOR POWERING DEVICES

It is a matter of fact that energy harvesters as we call them nowadays have been used for centuries. They appeared before the age of electricity, therefore, their output was purely mechanical. We can mention the invention of self-winding pocket watch by Swiss horologist AbrahamLouis Perrelet before French revolution in about 1770 while not claiming that it was the rst known example of energy harvester in the history. The mainspring of this self-winding watch was wound using the energy generated by the natural movements of the wearer. Another source of power was used in the clock Atmos invented in 1927 by French engineer Jean-Leon Reutter. The clock spring is wound using expansion or contraction of a sealed gas-lled capsule due to natural day-night changes in ambient temperature and periodic variations in atmospheric pressure. Necessity of a wireless remote control for a television pushed American physicist Robert Adler born in Austria to invent in 1956 a device which was converting mechanical energy of pushing the button on a remote control device into acoustic signals that controlled functions on the television set i.e., it used the principle similar to that of tuning folks . The device called Zenith space command stayed in use for over 2 decades. As far as we nowadays push buttons on our battery-powered remote controls, there was no additional effort required from the user of ultrasonic remote control and it might be called energy harvester. The age of electronics demands that the harvested energy must be converted into electricity. Therefore, modern automatic watches generate electricity instead of winding the spring. The photovoltaic PV cells are also used in low-power handheld devices and watches. The rst watch powered by PV cells has been designed by American inventor Roger Riehl, which has been marketed in 1972 under the brand name Synchronar. Some other modern watches are also powered using PV cells hidden behind a semitransparent dial. The simplest PV-powered calculators consume nowadays only few microwatts like a watch; therefore, at daytime they do not use a power from the backup primary battery. Thermoelectric converter of the human body heat into electricity was the latest in the market in the row of energy harvesters in handheld/wearable devices. The rst device of this type, again it was a watch Bulova Thermatron , has been marketed in 1980. However, the market success to thermoelectrically powered watches came later, in 1990s, after perfecting the electronics of watches. The modern self-powered watches consume a power in between several and 1 W, a very low power. However, if we look back into the history, we can nd out that even the rst selfwinding watches consumed extremely low power, too. Indeed, walking with such a watch in the pocket for just a few tens of minutes completely wound the mainspring. The same is related to the Atmos clock. Before getting an idea of making such self-winding clock, J.-L. Reutter designed the so-called 400-day Anniversary clock, wherein the power consumption has been reduced to

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extremely low level. It was so low that winding its spring once per 400 days was enough for timekeeping. Only upon such dramatic reduction in power consumption it turned out possible for him to design energy harvesting Atmos that consumes about 0.25 W on estimate, i.e., about four times less than the most economic modern electronic watches. Thus, the history gives actually a very fruitful idea that before designing the devices based on harvesting ambient energy, i the research must be performed on the energy available in the ambient for a particular device and ii the power consumption of the device itself must be minimized.

III. THEORETICAL BASES OF BODY-POWERED ELECTRONICS

A human body constantly generates heat as a useful side effect of metabolism. However, only a part of this heat is dissipated into the ambient as a heat ow and infrared radiation, the rest of it is rejected in a form of water vapor. Furthermore, only a small fraction of the heat ow can be used in a wearers friendly and unobtrusive energy scavenger. For example, nobody would accept a large device on his/her face. Therefore, the heat ow from it practically cannot be used. At last, due to the laws of thermodynamics, the heat ow cannot be effectively converted it into electricity. However, a human being generates more than 100 W of heat; therefore, a quite useful electrical power still can be obtained using a person as a heat generator. The tool for converting heat ow into electricity is a thermoelectric generator TEG , the heart of which is a thermopile. Typically, only a few watts of heat ow can be harvested unobtrusively on a person and thermoelectrically converted into several milliwatts in a form of electricity. If we recall that watches consume 1000 times less, it is fairly good power. Moreover, PV cells of the same area typically generate much less power because not much light is available indoors, where the authors and the reader of this paper are resting now. The human body is not a perfect heat generator as a heat supply for a wearable TEG. The body has high thermal resistance; therefore, the heat ow is quite limited. This is explained by the fact that warm-blooded animals have received in the process of evolution a very effective thermal management. This includes a very high thermal resistance of the body at ambient temperatures below 20 25 C if the skin temperature decreases below thermal comfort.1,2 As a result, not much heat is dissipated from the skin and only about 3 5 mW/ cm2 is available indoors, on average. The measured performance characteristics of wearable TEGs Ref. 3 coincide with their theoretical analysis.4,5 The practically conrmed conclusion is: a correctly designed unobtrusive TEG in the right location on the human body can produce approximately 10 30 W / cm2 of electrical power in moderate climate, on 24 h average. The produced power depends on the thickness of a TEG and its size: the thicker the TEG, the better its power generation, while the larger the TEG, the less power per unit area is produced. At the system level, a short-term or long-term power reserve must be provided in the form of rechargeable battery or a capacitor to avoid power shortages. Using such energy storage element, the power gained by a TEG on occasional basis can be uniformly redistributed and consumed at near-constant rate over a long period of time. There are specic requirements to both the thermopile and TEG in energy scavengers including wearable devices. First, the thermal resistance of a thermopile Rtp for maximum power generation must be equal to

Rtp =

R ppRTEG , R pp RTEG

where R pp is the thermal resistance of air and holding elements interconnecting the cold and hot plates of a TEG i.e., the elements connected thermally in parallel to the thermopile and RTEG is the optimal thermal resistance of a TEG, which maximizes power generation. The optimal thermal resistance can be obtained from the equation of its thermal matching with the ambient4

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FIG. 1. Body-powered wireless pulse oximeter.

RTEG =

Rbody + Rsi Ret , 2 Rbody + Rsi + Ret

where Rbody is the thermal resistance of human body in location of a TEG this is the thermal resistance between the body core and the chosen location on the skin , Rsi is the thermal resistance of a heat sink, i.e., the thermal resistance due to convection and radiation on the outer side of TEG, and Ret is the thermal resistance of TEG which would occur if the TEG becomes empty, with no thermoelectric material in it. Equation 2 is a thermal equivalent of electrical matching of a generator with its load. The last requirement is that the ratio N, N = Ret/ Rbody + Rsi , 3

must preferably be more than 1. This ratio depends on the size and thickness of a TEG. Therefore, the thinner TEG, the less power it regrettably produces. Equations 1 3 call for a semiempty TEG, where the thermopile occupies only a small part of the device volume; the rest must be occupied by air or a material with thermal conductivity less than the thermal conductivity of air. This is a nice requirement because wearing something empty is more pleasant than wearing heavy batteries.
IV. WEARABLE DEVICES POWERED BY THE USERS BODY

As the rst practical demonstration of body-powered medical devices, a wireless pulse oximeter SpO2 sensor has been designed, fabricated, and tested on people in 2006 Fig. 1 .6,7 The device noninvasively measures oxygen content in arterial blood. A watch-size TEG is used in this device as a power supply with a minimal power production of about 100 W at night and typical variations during the day within the 100 600 W range. A goldlike coating of the radiator provides nice appearance of the device. The coating has a high reection coefcient in the visible region of the spectrum to minimize heating by sunlight and high emission coefcient in the long-wave infrared region to enhance radiation losses from the TEG . Typically, battery-powered pulse oximeters existing in the market have a power consumption above 10 mW. Therefore, before making it powered from the human body, a power consumption of electronics has been reduced by a factor of about 103. In addition, both a low-power radio used and applied duty cycling enabled maintaining the overall power consumption at a record level of 62 W Fig. 2 . This battery-free device has a small supercapacitor 22 mF as a charge storage element for buffering the radio transmission bursts. It is operational up to temperatures of 25 26 C at daytime, and at a duty cycle of 26% . At higher ambient temperatures, the duty

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FIG. 2. Power consumption pie of pulse oximeter at an update rate of 15 s.

cycle must be reprogramed decreased , otherwise the power generated could be less than the power consumed. If this happens, the device switches into a sleeping regime for a while. During sleep, its power consumption is extremely low and the device wakes up again upon collecting enough charge in the supercapacitor, i.e., when the voltage on it exceeds 1.2 V. The disadvantage of energy storage in a supercapacitor is that only about half of the energy produced over 24 h is used for the application. When the storage supercapacitor is fully charged, there is no power transfer into it from the TEG unless the next measurement of the oxygen content in a blood is performed. The performance characteristics of the pulse oximeter are listed in Table I. Another example of battery-free body-powered devices is an electroencephalography EEG system fabricated in 2007.8,9 The main challenges in creation of such complex system powered by the wearers heat are i lowering power consumption of biopotential readout while maintaining the signal quality and ii real-time data transmission. In the above example of pulse oximeter, the signal processing is performed onboard so that power consumed by the transceiver is minimal Fig. 2 . In EEG, on the contrary, real-time brain waves should be transmitted, so the wireless link consumes large power. Following historical examples of successful energy harvesters, this work has started with effective reduction in power consumption of the EEG application. A low-power biopotential readout application-specic integrated circuit ASIC has been designed rst, which provided excellent signal quality despite very low-power consumption.10 Then, the battery-powered wireless EEG has been designed and its performance has been compared to the commercially available wired EEG system in a hospital in application to polysomnography .11 Only after that, the system has been turned into the self-powered one. The set of experiments has shown that the forehead is a convenient location of a TEG on the head. On one hand, the latter provides high heat ow on a large area. On the other hand, it is free from thermally isolating hair. The power consumption of the EEG circuit see Table II required a large-sized TEG, i.e., larger than 50 cm2. To t it to the patients head shape, it is designed as 10 sections with size of 1.6 4 cm2 on a stretchable headband Fig. 3 . The radiators on the outer side of thermopiles ensure effective heat dissipation into the ambient air and the thermal matching of TEG with the environment. The TEG is designed for indoor use at typical ambient temperatures

TABLE I. Pulse oximeter features at 22 C, typically. Power consumption W Daytime power generation capability Output voltage, stabilized V Autostart, within the min Measured body parameters 62 200 2 15 Heart pulse rate, oxygencontent in arterial blood Generated voltage and power, voltage on a supercapacitor 2.4 26

Monitored system parameters Carrier frequency GHz Reprogrammable duty cycle; typically %

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J. Renewable Sustainable Energy 1, 062701 2009

Power consumption mW Power generation capability at 22 C mW Output voltage, stabilized V Autostart at 22 C s Real-time monitoring of brain waves Input-referred noise nV/ Hz1/2 Bandwidth and gain CMRR dB Carrier frequency GHz Ambient temperatures; no headgear C

0.8 2.5 2 and 2.8 3050 2 channels 60 Selectable 110 2.4 2126

maintained in hospital wards. At 22 C, it produces about 30 W / cm2, i.e., close to the theoretical limit of power generation on people at this temperature in a compact device. There is, however, a drawback of such high power generation: at lower ambient temperatures, the heat ow rapidly exceeds the sensation of discomfort and the device turns into uncomfortably cold object. For example, at 19 C, the TEG already produces 3.7 mW, but the sensation of cold becomes too annoying. This problem is solved in exactly the same way as someone solves it on the body level in cold weather: a headgear should be worn on top of the system to limit the heat ow and make it comfortable. To improve EEG system described above, the TEG has been hybridized with PV cells in 2008. Indeed, despite the fact that PV cells do not produce the same power as a TEG of the same area, the outer surface of the latter is exposed to ambient light. Therefore, if the PV cells cover the TEG, the joint power generation improves with no increase in the system weight and size. In addition, this improved version of the device has been relocated from the forehead to the temples. For thermal shunting the hair, its surface touching the skin has been provided with a set of ns. The ns comb the persons hair, while the device is being put on. As a result, a good thermal contact with the skin is provided and the power generation becomes not worse than on the forehead. The PV cells provide additional power; therefore, the power generated by the TEG can be proportionally decreased. Therefore, smaller size of the TEG is required or its thickness can be decreased. The EEG system with such hybrid power supply, in principle, has to be supplied with a rechargeable battery because power generated by PV cells is much more unstable than the one generated by the TEG. However, in this demonstrator used in the ofce, it was left with a supercapacitor to show its self-start from the body heat. The headphonelike EEG diadem Fig. 4 is more comfortable, according to the user responses, in particular, at low ambient temperatures.9 The PV cells used in this device have been fabricated on a p-type oat zone Si substrate. In comparison to standard industrial process for monocrystalline PV cells, their surface has been modied using random micropyramid formation. Together with the lithographically dened frontside nger pattern, an efciency of 17% has been obtained. The PV cells are interconnected in the

FIG. 3. Body-powered ECG headband: 1 is a TEG and 2 is an electronic module.

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FIG. 4. Wireless EEG system with hybrid thermoelectric-PV power supply.

device in a chessboard way in two parallel circuits. This allowed obtaining an almost perfect dependence of power versus direction of light: the power output varies only within 5%, while the wearer makes a complete turn around him/herself in direct sunlight. The system has been tested at ambient temperatures down to 7 C; however, no discomfort has been mentioned by its wearers. Some features of this system are listed in Table III. The power consumption of the EEG system is illustrated in Fig. 5. About half of the power is consumed by the transceiver; therefore, more power-efcient radio would allow either shrinking the generator size or powering more channels. However, the microcontroller and biopotential readout consume the other half of the power. Taking this into account, the biopotential ASIC has been redesigned and its latest eight-channel version12 consumes the same power as the twochannel ASIC used in the battery-free EEG systems discussed above.
V. BODY-POWERED SYSTEMS IN CLOTHING

The battery-free systems discussed above have been designed to work at power consumption near the minimum of expected power generation to avoid power shortages . Indeed, when comparing row 1 the power consumption with row 2 power generation capability in any table
TABLE III. Features of the battery-free electroencephalorgaphy diadem with hybrid power supply at daytime, typically. Power consumption mW Power generation capability at 22 C mW Power generation test mW Thermoelectric generator no wind at 9.5 C at 21.8 C Photovoltaic cells Belguim, March Outdoors, sunny, at noon In the ofce, cloudy Autostart at 22 C s Real-time monitoring of brain waves Ambient temperatures; tested C 0.8 1.5

5.5 1.5 45 0.2 1030 2 channels 728

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FIG. 5. Power consumption pie of self-powered battery-free EEG systems.

above, the difference by a coefcient of 23 is always the case. The excess energy, which might be transferred into the charge storage supercapacitor most of the time, was not actually transferred because the latter was already fully charged. Therefore, at least 50%70% of energy was wasted. If, however, a secondary battery is used as an energy storage element, it can provide the required power for days or weeks even with no harvested energy.1 Therefore, using a battery enables operating the device at the power produced, on average, so that much less power is required from the TEG, on average. As a result, the TEG can be effectively miniaturized to be more comfortable for its user. To make a compact wearable self-powered device, the energy harvester is typically placed close to the location on the body, wherein the body parameters are being measured. Therefore, it seems logical that an electrocardiography ECG system should be preferably integrated somewhere on the chest. That is why an ECG system described below is integrated into a shirt. The ECG system in a shirt Fig. 6 is powered by a secondary battery. The power consumption is 0.5 mW, and therefore if the system would have a supercapacitor instead of a battery, a power of about 2 mW or much more would be required from the TEG at 22 C. This is to be sure that if the wearer puts a business suit jacket on, the system still works. With the battery, about 0.6 mW from the TEG is enough. The battery is constantly recharged using the wearers body heat. Fourteen 6.5-mm-thin thermoelectric modules with size of 3 4 cm2 have been integrated into the front side of the shirt it is less than 1.5% of the shirt area . The radiators of TEG modules have been painted like chameleon into the shirt colors, except one module that is to give impression about the module size. This actually illustrates two basic ways of module integration: one way is to make them invisible and the other way is to use radiators as decoration elements. The second way is even more interesting for the market, especially concerning the products for young generation. The wiring and the other modules of ECG system are located on the inner side of the shirt. PV cells are located on the shoulders to get maximum power both indoors and outdoors.

FIG. 6. Wireless ECG shirt powered by a hybrid thermoelectric-PV power supply: three thermoelectric modules, one of which intentionally colored in pink 1 , and amorphous PV cells 2 .

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FIG. 7. Electronic module of the EEG shirt upon its waterproof encapsulation.

In the ofce, the TEG typically generates the power within the 0.81 mW range at about 1 V on the matched load. However, if the wearer walks indoors, the power production rapidly increases to 23 mW. Because of high thermal resistance of TEG modules, they are never cold. In this sense, the modules function in the same way as a textile. In cold weather, the other pieces of clothing are worn on top of the shirts. However, as measured at about 10 C outdoors while wearing a thick jacket, the power generation is by 10%20% better than indoors. The power management module contains a fully integrated dc/dc upconverter fabricated in a 0.35 m process.13 It works with an open-circuit input voltage of 0.5 V or higher from a TEG, converts it up and charges a small 2.4 V NiMH battery. The converter ASIC provides up to 0.33 mW; therefore, three converters have been connected in parallel to enable input power up to 2 mW to be efciently transferred into the battery. The converter contains a charge pump with variable number of stages. A control algorithm can be used to vary the number of stages and switching rate, and therefore to operate always with near-maximum efciency. The net power conversion efciency is 44% at an open-circuit TEG voltage of 2 V. It increases while the voltage decreases and exceeds 70% at the voltage less than 0.9 V. In parallel to the TEG power conversion circuit, there is a secondary parallel circuit that allows charging the battery directly from PV cells. Two low-cost amorphous silicon solar cells, with size of 2.5 4 cm2 each, are integrated into the shirt on its shoulders Fig. 6 . PV cells are added to the system because if the shirt is not worn for months, the battery can be discharged. In such case, it can be charged again by placing the shirt in direct sunlight for a few days. Therefore, when the shirt is taken off and not used for a long time, it must be stored in an environment where light is available periodically, e.g., in a wardrobe with windows. The small power provided by PV cells is sufcient to compensate for the self-discharge of the battery that is by a factor of about 20 exceeds the standby power. In this way, even after months of nonuse, the electronics is maintained in the ready-to-start state, waiting for the moment the shirt is used again. The open-circuit output voltage of PV cells 5.2 V in the ofce is high enough; therefore, they are connected directly to the battery through a simple rectier circuit. The use of PV cells has other advantages, too. First, it provides some additional power e.g., at least 100 150 W in the ofce , and, second, in tropical countries, PV cells compensate for a lack of power generated by the TEG. The necessity of laundry demands reliable waterproof encapsulation of the system components: a TEG, PV cells, and electronics. The latter is integrated in a two-sided ex circuit and encapsulated using a silicone molding Fig. 7 . Smart power management is one of the key

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TABLE IV. Some features of the ECG shirt with hybrid power supply preliminary data . Power generation capability at 22 C mW Charge pump output range mW Charge pump efciency at 5 stages % Power consumption in active regime mW Power consumption in standby regime W Autostart s Washing machine at 1000 rpm Iron pressing max. temp. for cotton 1 0.031 67 4 0.6 1 A few Passed Passed

elements of self-powered systems. As discussed above, the system uses two complementary power sources and its charge pump can track the optimal power conversion by changing the number of its stages and switching frequency depending on input power. In addition, the microcontroller keeps track of the input power from the TEG and of the available energy stored in the battery. If these drop below a safe threshold, the system performs an autocompensation by temporarily reducing the sampling rate and transmission duty cycle. This allows nonstop wireless acquisition of an ECG signal on cost of its quality even under severe energy decit, where the full-quality signal acquisition that requires 0.5 mW cannot be provided. If the voltage from a TEG drops to near zero, which happens when the shirt is taken off, the system switches into a standby state with low-power consumption Table IV . Because of extreme fragility of thermopiles, the shock protection components enforce thermoelectric modules. As a result, its laundry with an acceleration of 250g is allowed. Despite using a noniron shirt for the ECG system, its pressing can be performed safely because wiring sustains all possible regimes of pressing. The ex with electronics is divided into quasirigid islands with dense components. The islands are interconnected through highly exible zones. This gives a limited amount of exibility to the circuit and makes it compatible with both integration in clothes and laundry. The production cost of TEGs still exceeds the cost of the batteries. This is because a very small temperature drop can be obtained in wearable thermopiles, i.e., one to a few C. As a result, a large number of thermocouples, a few thousand, are required, thereby adversely affecting the system cost. However, microelectronic technologies may help alleviate this problem.

VI. MODERN TECHNOLOGIES FOR WEARABLE THERMOPILES

It is quite interesting that the theory Sec. III does not demand large-size thermopiles for the maximum power generation in a wearable TEG. The only requirement for a thermopile is that it must have high thermal resistance per cm2 of the harvester on the skin. If a small-size thermopile, e.g., a micromachined one, replaces in such TEG, e.g., in a watch-size TEG, the thermopiles purchased in the market, it can produce the same power. This does not mean that any small-size thermopile is good for the target application. Still both the electrical contact resistance and thermal conductance parallel to the thermopile in a TEG must be minimized because these are parasitic factors that adversely affect its performance characteristics. In fact, both factors can render the device worthless. The modeling of micromachined thermopiles in a wearable TEG shows that due to scaling laws, the smaller thermopile, the lower aspect ratio is required Fig. 8 . An aspect ratio is the ratio of the height of thermocouple legs to their lateral dimension. Commercially available thermopiles require high aspect ratio of about 30; therefore, the only feasible solution is to make multistage thermopiles. Scaling the thermopile down results in proportional decrease in the aspect ratio that is required for getting the same thermal resistance. As a result, at lateral dimensions below 10 m, the optimal aspect ratio could be decreased to the values acceptable in microelectronics

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FIG. 8. Scaling of a thermopile at its constant thermal resistance. While thermopiles on the market require high aspect ratio l / w left , their miniaturized microelectronic counterparts need much lower aspect ratio right .

technologies.14 At larger lateral dimensions, i.e., several tens of micrometers, thick lm and microelectromechanical system MEMS technologies could be used instead. However, the smaller thermopile, the better is the chance of its market success. As a proof of the theoretical concept, a micromachined thermopile with 0.5 m tall polySiGe thermocouples see Fig. 9 a has been fabricated on a 4 4 mm2 die.15 Based on the modeling results, in such a thermopile covered by a heat sink die Fig. 8, right , the air between the dies thermally shunts the thermopile, thereby decreasing the useful temperature drop on it to a few tens of millikelvins. Therefore, the thermopile Figs. 9 b and 9 c has been fabricated on top of a 250 m tall rim etched in a silicon wafer Fig. 9 d . This has been done for decoupling the thermocouple height and parasitic thermal conductance through the air inside the TEG.16 In the two versions of the thermopile, either 2350 or 4700 thermocouples have been fabricated close to each other on top of the rim so that one thermocouple occupies an area of about 30 15 m2. After the ion etch of the substrate, the mean distance between the thermopile die and a bare silicon

FIG. 9. Micromachined polycrystalline SiGe thermopile: a Design of a thermocouple with a 2.5 m deep trench, a and b are hot and cold thermocouple junctions, respectively; b SEM picture of three thermocouple bridges over a trench; c a corner of the rim lled with thermocouples; d the design of a thermopile on a silicon rim not in scale ; e the design of a thermoelectric generator, wherein the thermopile die is ip-chip bonded to the heat sink top die; and f and g two wrist TEGs with a micromachined thermopile inside.

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FIG. 10. Design of arcade thermocouples left: three thermocouples are shown modify from Ref. 17 , and a SEM picture of self-supported 6 m tall released thermocouples with a critical dimension of 3 m reported in Ref. 19.

die attached to its top as a heat sink die Fig. 9 e increases by a factor of a few hundred. This allows reaching N 1 Eq. 3 . An additional decrease in the parasitic thermal conductance through the air between the hot plate and the radiator Fig. 9 e has been reached by increasing the distance between them and by using the thermally conducting aluminum spacer to interconnect the top die with the radiator. As a result, despite the too low topography used in the device, a temperature drop of 0.6 1 C is obtained on the thermopile in a wrist device Figs. 9 f and 9 g . The temperature drop depends on the persons activity and increases under the forced air convection, i.e., on a walking person. Two versions of a MEMS energy harvester have been fabricated. In the rst one Fig. 9 f , the radiator is supported by thermally isolating pillars. In the second one Fig. 9 g , the thermal resistance of the ambient air is further decreased by using pin-featured radiator. An additional protection grid surrounds it and serves as a touch protection as well as an outer shock protection. Two steps are still required to make such technology mature and competitive to batteries in wearable devices: i increase the aspect ratio and height of microthermocouples and ii develop a thin-lm BiTe technology with better thermoelectric quality of the materials than can be reached with poly-SiGe. The required aspect ratio can be reached using projection lithography because a critical dimension of 1 3 m is sufcient.17,18 The minimum target within the required 6 12 m height of thermocouples has been already reached Fig. 10 ,19 and the research is ongoing toward practical demonstration of poly-SiGe thermopiles with high aspect ratio. The second step, i.e., the lm technology for BiTe materials, is also in progress2022 so that in the near future their thermoelectric properties are expected to approach those of bulk materials. The production cost of micromachined thermopiles can be by a factor of 1001000 less than the cost of todays thermopiles in the market because only 1 2 mm2 of the wafer is required for devices such as those shown in Fig. 9. Therefore, in mass production, wearable thermopiles can be very competitive on cost with the batteries. The other technologies such as thick-lm ones23,24 could also have a market success if a low-cost process is developed.
VII. CONCLUSION

The human body produces heat equivalent to the heat dissipated by a few laptops. Several tens of watts out of the produced heat are dissipated as a heat ows from the skin, depending on ambient conditions the temperature, humidity, and wind . Due to laws of thermodynamics, this heat cannot be effectively converted into electricity. Within the 22 30 C ambient temperature range, the theoretical thermoelectric efciency of converting human body heat into electricity varies from 0.4% to 0.2%, on average. In a thin device, i.e., not thicker than a watch, the obtainable power varies within 30 7 W / cm2 of the persons skin, respectively. Taking into account that only a few percent of the body area unobtrusively can be covered by thermoelectric modules, the only few milliwatts of electrical power can be obtained on a person. The extensively measured performance of wearable thermoelectric generators conrms the calculation result that, in such applications, they outperform solar cells, on a typical person. Therefore, neither a mobile

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Wearable self-powered electronics

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phone or a geographical positioning system device nor a personal digital assistant can be selfpowered. Only several minutes per day can be provided, which does not satisfy the market needs. Wearable sensors and medical devices, including wireless ones, rapidly evolve to very powerefcient devices while maintaining high signal quality. This enables powering them using body heat and ambient light. The market success to such self-powered systems can come only if the production cost of thermopiles is dramatically decreased. Several parallel developments of microelectronic and MEMS technologies for a new lm-based generation of thermopiles is ongoing, but still these are not mature. Some additional information for the reader is provided in a power point presentation on wearable electronics self-powered from the human body, its present state and perspectives.25 The power-efcient self-powered smart electronics, in particular, wearable electronics, is knocking on the doors of the market. However, the battery in such devices cannot be simply replaced with an energy harvester. It requires system redesign, smart power management and, frequently, a very-low-power radio. In clothes, the necessity of laundry and pressing gives a good chance to self-powered systems to compete successively with batteries. Environmental aspects are also in favor of energy harvesters that offer much greener garments for their postuse utilization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the designers of low-power electronic circuits and modules, T. Torfs, R. F. Yazicioglu, and I. Doms as well as the whole enthusiastic research team of IMEC and Holst Centre working on energy harvesters, photovoltaic cells, and wireless systems. Special thanks are due to C. Chan SEMICON Singapore for the invitation to present our research Ref. 25 , which has made it easier to summarize the work in this paper.
V. Leonov and R. Vullers, Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Thermoelectrics ECT 07 , Odessa, Ukraine, 1012 September 2007, pp. 4752. 2 Heat Loss from Animals and Man, edited by J. Monteith and L. Mount Butterworths, London, 1974 . 3 V. Leonov, B. Gyselinckx, C. Van Hoof, T. Torfs, R. Yazicioglu, R. Vullers, and P. Fiorini, in Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Smart Systems Integration (SSI 08), Barcelona, Spain, 9 and 10 April 2008, edited by T. Gessner VDE, Berlin, 2008 , pp. 217224. 4 V. Leonov and P. Fiorini, Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Thermoelectrics ICT 07 , Odessa, Ukraine, 1012 September 2007, pp. 129133. 5 V. Leonov and R. J. M. Vullers, J. Electron. Mater. 38, 1491 2009 . 6 T. Torfs, V. Leonov, and R. J. M. Vullers, Sensors & Transducers J. 80, 1230 2007 . 7 T. Torfs, V. Leonov, C. Van Hoof, and B. Gyselinckx, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Sensors, Daegu, Korea, 2225 October 2006, pp. 427430. 8 T. Torfs, V. Leonov, R. F. Yazicioglu, R. J. M. Vullers, P. Fiorini, B. Gyselinckx, and C. Van Hoof, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Sensors, Lecce, Italy, 2629 October 2008, pp. 12691272. 9 M. Van Bavel, V. Leonov, R. F. Yazicioglu, T. Torfs, C. Van Hoof, N. E. Posthuma, and R. J. M. Vullers, Sensors & Transducers J. 94, 103 2008 . 10 R. F. Yazicioglu, P. Merken, B. Puers, and C. Van Hoof, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 42, 1100 2007 . 11 N. de Vicq, F. Robert, J. Penders, B. Gyselinckx, and T. Torfs, Proceedings of IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference BIOCAS 07 , Montreal, Canada, 2730 November 2007, pp. 163166. 12 R. F. Yazicioglu, P. Merken, R. Puers, and C. Van Hoof, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 43, 3025 2008 . 13 I. Doms, P. Merken, R. Mertens, and C. Van Hoof, Digest of Technical Papers IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference ISSCC , San Francisco, CA, 711 February 2009, pp. 300301a. 14 V. Leonov, J. Electron. Mater. 38, 1483 2009 . 15 V. Leonov, Z. Wang, P. Fiorini, and C. Van Hoof, Sensors and Transducers J. 103, 29 2009 . 16 V. Z. Wang, V. Leonov, P. Fiorini, and C. Van Hoof, Realization of wearable miniaturized thermoelectric generator for human body applications, Sens. Actuators, A in press . 17 V. Leonov, Z. Wang, R. Pellens, C. Gui, R. Vullers, and J. Su, Proceedings of the Fifth International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference IECEC , St. Louis, MO, 2527 June 2007, AIAA Paper No. 2007-4782-754. 18 J. Su, R. Vullers, M. Goedbloed, Y. van Andel, R. Pellens, C. Gui, V. Leonov, and Z. Wang, Proceedings of the Seventh Power MEMS Workshop, Freiburg, Germany, 28 and 29 November 2007, pp. 153156. 19 J. Su, M. Goedbloed, R. J. M. Vullers, Y. van Andel, V. Leonov, and Z. Wang, Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Micro & Nano Engineering, Ghent, Belgium, September 28October 1 2009 Thermoelectric energy harvester fabricated by stepper, special issue of Microelectron. Eng. in press . 20 H. Bttner, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Thermoelectrics ICT 02 , Long Beach, CA, 2529 August 2002, pp. 511518. 21 G. Snyder, J. Lim, C.-K. Huang, and J.-P. Fleurial, Nature Mater. 2, 528 2003 . 22 S. Sedky, A. Kamal, M. Yomn, H. Bakr, R. Ghannam, V. Leonov, and P. Fiorini, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE
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International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Transducers 09 , Denver, CO, 2125 June 2009, pp. 10351038. 23 I. Stark, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks BSN 06 , Boston, MA, 35 April 2006. 24 V. Leonov, R. Vullers, M. Goedbloed, and Y. van Andel, Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Thermoelectrics ECT 08 , Paris, 24 July 2008, pp. O17-14. 25 V. Leonov and R. J. M. Vullers, SEMICON Singapore, 2022 May 2009, Wearable electronics self-powered from the human body: State of the art and perspectives, http://www.semiconsingapore.org/ ProgrammesandEvents/cms/groups/public/documents/web_content/ctr_029926.pdf.

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