A Micropower Supervisor for Wireless Nodes with a Digital Pulse Frequency Modulator Battery Monitor

摘要

In the last few years the increased development of wireless technologies led to the development of micropower devices with power management and real time power control, aimed to maximize the battery life time. The main and simplest method to estimate residual battery life time is by voltage measurement. This kind of measurement is simple but is useless in many cases, especially when long term Lithium- Thionyl chloride batteries are used, since its voltage is flat for more than 90% of the battery discharge. In this case, a current control should be used. However, these kinds of devices have various problems as a limited range of measurement and not negligible quiescent current that may distort the measurements. In this work we developed a micropower supervisor for wireless sensor nodes with a charge battery monitor, whose features are aimed at solving the problems just described. The current measured by a sense resistor, is filtered by a super-capacitor, amplified by a current sense amplifier and then fed to a voltage to pulse frequency modulator. In this way, the charge consumption can be estimated without the saturation of the current sense amplifier, even if the wireless node consumes time limited high current spikes, for example during transmission.