A Thermoelectric Cooler reused as Harvester to Power a 434 MHz Wireless Wakeup Receiver from a 10 K Ambient Temperature Gradient

This article describes a thermal energy harvesting solution based on a thermoelectric cooler (TEC) or Peltier-element, which is able to power a 434 MHz wakeup receiver (WuRx) solely from harvested heat. The dc current consumption of the WuRx analog frontend and digital backend together is 788 nA from a 1.5V supply. Accordingly, the WuRx can be powered via a 1.5 V step-up dc-dc converter from a Peltier-element, which is exposed to a temperature difference of 10K. The Peltier-element outputs more than 70mV for currents below 10 mA. The WuRx receives on-off keying (OOK) modulated signals with a bit rate of 10 kbit/s and has an input sensitivity of -95 dBm (code error rate < 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup>). This setup constitutes an example of sustainable electronics in the context of IoT and ongoing networking between humans and machines.