3.1.2. Energy storage.To achieve long operational lifetimes, most portable and implantable biomedical devices have local reserves of energy. These local reserves are often stored electrically in a capacitor or chemically in a battery. Primary (nonrechargeable) batteries are used for single-use biomedical applications, such as swallowable capsules, or for devices with a sufficiently long battery life, such as wristwatches or pacemakers, where replacing the battery is not a burden. Silver-oxide primary batteries have been used to power swallowable capsules for the 8-h examination of a patient's digestive tract (28). In long-lifetime applications where primary batteries become prohibitively expensive or inconvenient to replace, secondary (rechargeable) batteries are preferred. A common application of secondary batteries is to power the behind-the-ear instrument of cochlear implants. Two important issues facing secondary batteries are that their capacity degrades over time and that not all batteries can supply the high peak currents required by applications, including cardioverter-defibrillators.
An emerging energy storage technology that has the potential to solve these problems is thin-film batteries (29). Thin-film batteries possess long lifetimes of thousands of charges and discharges, low series resistance, and comparable energy density to existing batteries. These batteries can be hundreds of micrometers thin and are amenable for implantable applications where volume must be minimized. A second emerging technology that promises to improve upon capacitors by increasing their energy storage density is ultracapacitors. In an ultracapacitor, the aluminum electrodes of a traditional capacitor are coated with a thin layer of extremely porous electrically conductive activated carbon, the separator is made of a porous nonconducting material, and the interior is filled with a liquid electrolyte rather like a battery. When a voltage is applied, the positive ions from the electrolyte are absorbed into the activated carbon on the negative electrode and vice versa. The Helmholtz principle of double layers combined with the extremely high surface area of the activated carbon yield more than one hundred times the energy density of traditional capacitors. Although they have extremely high power density compared with chemical batteries, traditional ultracapacitors have only approximately 5% the energy density of lithium batteries. However, there has been research in using a coating of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes in place of the activated carbon (30). If successful, this has the potential to achieve comparable energy densities to lithium ion batteries.
3.1.3. Voltage converter.As load devices often operate at different voltages than the battery voltage or the voltage out of the energy harvester, a voltage converter is used to generate an appropriate and stable supply for the load. By generating an appropriate voltage for the load, a voltage converter can extend battery life by allowing the load device to operate at its optimal energy point. The key challenge of voltage converters for biomedical applications is achieving high efficiencies at ultralow-power levels and in a small volume (31). Moreover, the output voltage must not fluctuate from its desired value even though the converter can suffer from a variable battery voltage, varying load current, and switching noise (32).
The voltage converter for a biomedical device must be optimized for the voltage and current required by the load. Energy-efficient digital complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits operate off a supply voltage at or below 1 V, and most biomedical applications require currents between a few microamps to a few milliamps. To generate these voltages from a higher-voltage battery, a step-down (buck) converter is required. When only a small step-down is required, a low drop-out linear regulator is a simple and robust approach; however, for a large step-down, the efficiency of an LDO is poor and switching regulators are preferred.
Micropower switching converters have demonstrated efficiencies greater than 80% for loads down to 1 μW (33). The two main voltage converter topologies are switched capacitor–based and inductor/transformer–based switching converters. These converters can be configured in both step-down (buck) and step-up (boost) configurations. The power conversion efficiency of a switching converter is dictated by the following equation: