Building Blocks of Photovoltaic Energy Harvesting Systems
Professor Dina El-Damak
German University in Cairo
Cairo, Egypt

Abstract
Advances in sensors, embedded processing, and wireless connectivity have fueled the emergence of wearable and implantable electronics. Thus, this tutorial will provide the foundation of energy harvesting circuits for such ultra-low-power devices for seamless operation. The tutorial will be split into three modules as follows, with an extensive focus on the interface circuit design: 1. Power converter design: inductive-based converters, switched capacitor DC-DC converters, passives, losses calculation, and design strategies for maximal efficiency for ultra-low power applications, 2. Ultra-low power control circuits: circuit design in sub-threshold, maximum power extraction techniques, output regulation logic, and design of ultra-low power reference circuits, 3. Fundamentals of energy transducers: equivalent circuits of energy transducers for solar-based applications. The tutorial concludes with several design examples of PV energy harvesting systems.

Biography
Dina El-Damak has been an assistant professor at the German University in Cairo (GUC) since September 2022. From September 2020 to August 2022, she was an assistant professor at Zewail City in Egypt. From August 2016 to August 2020, She was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. She received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2012 and 2015, respectively, under the supervision of Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan. After receiving her doctoral degree, she spent one year as a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories. She has published in major conferences and journals, including ISSCC, VLSI Circuits, and Technology, IEDM, JSSC, Nanoletters, and Nature Biomedical Engineering. She holds three US patents. She was the recipient of the Texas Instruments Graduate Woman's Fellowship for Leadership in Microelectronics at MIT. She was selected as one of the women rising stars in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley in 2014. She is one of the organizers of the 2023 IEEE Power Supply on Chip (PwrSoC) Conference in Germany. She is a senior member of IEEE.