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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS 1

A Neural Network Assistance AMPPT Solar

Energy Harvesting System With 89.39%
Efficiency and 0.01–0.5% Tracking Errors
Yuanfei Wang , Student Member, IEEE, Ping Luo , Member, IEEE, Xiao Zeng , Member, IEEE,
Dingming Peng, Zhaoji Li, Member, IEEE, and Bo Zhang , Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract— This paper presents a high-performance solar

energy harvesting system with improved adaptive maximum
power point tracking (AMPPT) method utilizing neural net-
work (NN) model as assistance. Under the guidance of the
negative feedback control (NFC) model, a BJT based voltage
control oscillator with three off-chip reconfigurable resistors is
designed in this paper to improve the reusability of the solar
energy harvesting system. Meanwhile, the AMPPT accuracy has
much improvement by co-simulation of MATLAB/Simulink and
Virtuoso with the help of NN model of Photovoltaic (PV) Cell.
The complete system with output voltage of 4.2V to power the
battery is designed and fabricated in 0.18µm CMOS technology.
According to the test results, the system can track the maximum
power points (MPP) successfully with average voltage tracking
errors of 0.23% (0.01-0.51%) of PV cell 1 and 0.29% (0.01-0.5%)
of PV cell 2 when the light intensity changes from 3000lux to
10000lux. Without power hungry current sensor or voltage sensor
and other complicated control circuits, the peak efficiency is
about 89.39% @ 3000lux.
Index Terms— Solar energy harvesting system, adaptive max-
imum power point tracking (AMPPT) method, neural net-
work (NN), negative feedback control (NFC) model, BJT based
voltage control oscillator, co-simulation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I NTERNET of things (IoT) has been a research hotspot
in recent years, more and more IoT applications are
used to solve the problems such as data acquisition and
industrial monitoring. Conventionally, IoT applications are
powered by batteries. Due to the limited battery capacity,
charging or changing the batteries is the biggest challenging
for promoting the IoT applications. Thanks to the low power
consumption of most IoT applications, it is interested to
power IoT applications by energy harvesting system. Energy
harvesting system collects energy from ambient sources like,
Manuscript received September 11, 2019; revised December 5, 2019,
February 16, 2020, and March 26, 2020; accepted April 12, 2020. This
work was supported by Project under Grant 31513030209. This article
was recommended by Associate Editor F. M. Neri. (Corresponding author:
Ping Luo.)
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin
Films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and
Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China (e-mail: nkswyf@sina.cn;
pingl@uestc.edu.cn; icyxiao@sina.com; dmpeng@foxmail.com;
zjli@uestc.edu.cn; zhangbo@uestc.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSI.2020.2990740
1549-8328 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Fig. 1. The structure of a solar energy harvesting system.
solar radiation [1], vibration [2], thermal gradient [3] or radio
frequency waves [4]. The convenience of energy acquisition
makes energy harvesting technology become an attractive and
promising option for powering IoT applications. Moreover,
solar energy is widely preferred over other energy sources for
the advantages of high power-density and ubiquitous nature of
light.
Fig. 1 shows the structure of the solar energy har-
vesting system [5]. The function of the DC-DC con-
verter with voltage regulation block is to convert the
unstable input voltage from the PV cell to stable out-
put voltages such as 3.3V, 4.2V. The DC-DC converter
can be implemented by low-dropout (LDO) [6], inductor-
based switch converter [7]–[9], and switched-capacitor (SC)
converter [10]–[23]. Furthermore, because of the unstable and
discontinuous characteristic of the ambient energy sources,
energy storage unit is also needed for most IoT applications.
The target of the maximum power point tracking (MPPT)
block is to maximize the power extracted from the PV cells.
This is achieved by matching the impedance of PV cell with
the input impedance of the converter. There are two key issues
to consider in designing a solar energy harvesting system with
MPPT: (1) reduce the power consumption of the converter
itself to improve the overall efficiency; (2) improve the track-
ing accuracy of MPPT to ensure more energy delivered to the
energy storage unit and load. Thanks to its high integration,
low EMI and flexible buck-boost function compared to the
inductor-based converter and LDO, SC converter is chosen as
a mainstream to be designed to achieve impedance matching
by changing the switching frequency, switch width, conversion
ratio and the capacitor values.
So far, hill climbing method that one can achieve MPP
by adjusting perturbation step size is widely used for low
power solar energy harvesting in IoT applications to track

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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
the maximum power point (MPP) of the PV cells. The 1-D
MPPT technique was adopted in [12] and [18] by changing the
switching frequency and tuning the capacitor values respec-
tively. The 2-D MPPT in [12] adjusted the conversion ratio
and the switching frequency at the same time. The 3-D MPPT
was proposed in [19] changed the switch width in addition
to the conversion ratio and the switching frequency. Another
hill-climbing method proposed in [20] used time as a measure
for tracking the MPP without the need of voltage references,
perturbation step, and current or voltage sensors. Though its
power consumption and design complexity had been reduced,
an 8-bit digital to analog converter (DAC) was still needed. All
those hill climbing methods had the strength of high efficiency
but still had the disadvantages of slow convergence speed and
complicated control circuits.
In order to further reduce the energy consumption and
design complexity, reference [21] presented a low-overhead
adaptive MPPT (AMPPT) method based on the negative
feedback control (NFC) loop first time, which doesn’t need
any sensors and other complicated control circuits, the only
block needed in this method was a specially designed volt-
age control oscillator (VCO). Few literatures had taken the
effort to design the special oscillator. A polynomial VCO
was employed in [21] which could track the MPP but it is
uncontrolled at a certain voltage. Reference [22] employed a
current-starved VCO (CS-VCO) which was able to track the
MPP successfully with a tracking error of 0.1−0.6%, however,
the CS-VCO which was on-chip needed be redesigned so
that it should follow the system desired V – f curve with a
different PV cell. Reference [23] employed an oscillator with
exponential relationship between the output voltage of the PV
cell and the switching frequency by subtracting the Vgs of two
sub-threshold-region transistors. Those AMPPT methods are
suitable for fully customized design, once the PV cell changed
those VCOs could not make corresponding changes to adapt
to the new harvesting objects.
It is undeniable that the NFC method can achieve high
efficiency and high accuracy performance at the same time for
its least auxiliary circuit and special closed loop structure. The
motivation behind this paper is to further improve the tracking
accuracy and make the NFC method become more suitable
for industrialization. Thus, a solar energy harvesting system
with improved AMPPT method utilizing neural network model
as assistance is proposed in this paper. Meanwhile, different
from the fully customized design in reference [21]–[23],
a BJT based VCO with three off-chip reconfigurable resistors
is designed in this paper to improve the reusability of the
solar energy harvesting system. And through comparison of
analytical model of the AMPPT and the model of the designed
VCO, the proposed VCO is more compatible in terms of
nonlinearity than those designed in [21]–[23].
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
main idea of the proposed AMPPT method is presented in
Section II. The analytical model of the AMPPT is discussed
in Section III. Section IV explains the design principle of the
proposed BJT based VCO. The simulation of the whole system
is shown in Section V, followed by the experimental results in
Section VI. Finally, Section VII concludes this paper.
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Fig. 2. Several parameters of the AMPPT method.
II. T HE M AIN I DEA OF I MPROVED AMPPT M ETHOD
A. Several Indicators of AMPPT Method
Different from hill climbing methods which are non-
customized, AMPPT method has a great dependence on the
pre-simulation. As shown as Fig. 2, three different MPPs
are involved throughout the whole design and test process.
(Pr , Vr ) is the real MPP which is obtained by high precision
data sampling. (Ps , Vs ) is the simulated MPP of the electrical
equivalent model or other fitting models of the PV cell.
(Pt , Vt ) is the tracked MPP.
Correspondingly, there are several indicators related to
the accuracy of the AMPPT methods according to existing
literatures, in order to facilitate comparison with prior arts,
those indicators are used in this paper as well.
Reference [20] defined an indicator called tracking effi-
ciency characterized the power relationship between the
tracked MPP and the real MPP during test. The second indi-
cator defined in reference [24] named closeness to maximum
power which characterized the power relationship between
the tracked MPP and the simulated MPP during simulation.
According to reference [21] and [22], the third indicator called
tracking error represented the percentage difference between
the tracked voltage and the voltage of the MPP which can be
used to evaluate the tracking performance as also. In fact, there
exists another indicator called simulating efficiency showed the
power relationship of simulated MPP and real MPP during
establishing the equivalent model to simulate the performance
of PV cells. Those indicators can be expressed as follows:
tracking efficiency: T E = Pt /Pr
closeness to maximum power: CT M P = Pt /Ps
tracking error: T E R = |Vt − Vr | /Vr
simulating efficiency: S E = Ps /Pr
Thus, it is obviously that there exists the following equation:
T E = CT M P × SE (1)
According to (1), increasing the values of CTMP and SE
by measures is the effective way to improve the tracking
performance of MPPT.
B. Conventional AMPPT Method Based on Electrical
Equivalent Model
Conventionally, an electrical equivalent model is always
used as an input energy source to simulate the performance
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WANG et al.: NEURAL NETWORK ASSISTANCE AMPPT SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM 3

Fig. 3. Pre-simulation architecture of the conventional AMPPT method.

Fig. 5. Implemented architecture of the proposed NN-A-AMPPT method.

Fig. 4. The design flow of the conventional AMPPT method.

Fig. 6. The design flow of the proposed NN-AMPPT method.

of PV cells [21], [22] during pre-simulation. The architecture

of the conventional AMPPT method is as shown in Fig. 3.
co-simulation of MATLAB/Simulink and Virtuoso to improve
I pc is the generated photocurrent by photovoltaic conversion,
the CTMP during pre-simulation.
R S is the parasitic series resistance, and R P is the equivalent
As a widely used nonlinear computing tool, NN model
shunt resistance. D is the area of the equivalent diode. N is
is highly concerned in recent years [25], [26] to be applied
the number of the light intensity conditions.
to various fields. Compared to other fitting methods, such
First of all, the VCOs are specially designed during pre-
as regression and polynomial curve fitting method, NN has
simulation to change the frequency of the SC converter
the best fitting performance when massive data for training
to realize impedance matching with the PV cell. Several
NN model is available. Compared to the behavioral model
VCOs have been designed in previous literatures such as a
introduced in [27], NN model has higher fitting accuracy and
polynomial VCO [21], a CS-VCO [22] and a sub-threshold-
as a mathematical method, it doesn’t need to consider their
region transistor based VCO [23]. Those VCOs had the same
physical parameters. Moreover, NN model can be implemented
disadvantage that they were suitable for customized design,
in hardware which can make it further develop combing with
which means that one circuit can only be used to track the
solar energy harvesting system in future.
MPP of one certain PV cell.
In order to improve the shortcomings of the conventional
Secondly, when the designer needs to build the equivalent
AMPPT methods, the proposed neural network assistance
model under N light intensities, the design flow of the con-
adaptive MPPT (NN-A-AMPPT) is implemented as shown as
ventional AMPPT method based on the electrical equivalent
Fig. 5. A BJT based VCO with three off-chip reconfigurable
model shown as Fig. 4 can be concluded through the APPEN-
resistors is designed to fit with the desired V – f curve of the
DIX of [24]. to Many factors of PV cell should be adjusted
real MPP. The neural network (NN) model of PV cell with
until the SE is greater than preset value. It means that every
light intensity (LI) and V P H as input, I P H as output is used
time the work environment changes such as the light intensity,
to fit with the I-V characteristic. V P H and I P H are the output
irradiation and temperature, a new equivalent circuit is needed
voltage and current of the PV cell as well as the input voltage
to fit the characteristic of the PV cell, thus it increases the
and current of the SC converter.
difficulty in design.
Thus, the design flow of the proposed NN-A-AMPPT
These two shortcomings mentioned above not only limit
method is shown as Fig. 6. Firstly, I-V test experiments of
the universality of the AMPPT, but also reduce the tracking
PV cell are needed to get enough sample data of LI, V P H
performance of the AMPPT.
and I P H to build the NN model and obtain the real MPP.
Then the NN model replaces the PV cell and simulates it to
C. The Proposed NN Assistance AMPPT Method complete the simulation. The NN model as the off-chip part
With the guidance of (1), the main idea of this paper is in Fig. 5 can be realized by MATLAB function. The circuit
manifested in three aspects: 1) use NN model as assistance to designed in Virtuoso as the on-chip part is called through
improve the SE; 2) design a reconfigurable VCO to fit with SpectreRF engine in Simulink. These two parts complete the
the desired V-f curve to improve the university; 3) use the co-simulation work in MATLAB. Until the co-simulation to

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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS

further improve the circuit design is completed, the whole

system can enter the process of layout and test.
As long as there is enough sample data, the accuracy of
the NN model can be much higher than electrical equivalent
model. With the help of co-simulation method, the light
intensity can be easily controlled to simulate the illumination
changing. More detailed information of co-simulation method
was introduced in [28]. At the same time, due to the use of
Fig. 7. SC converter used in this paper (a) charge state; (b) discharge state.
NN model, some important circuit parameters related to MPPT
can be determined and optimized by co-simulation.
In a word, the NN model plays an important role in
where,
improving operability and determining circuit parameters by
simulating PV cell in practical applications. R P (I pc + I S AT ) 1 nVt h
α= , β=− , δ=− ,
(R S + R P ) (R S + R P ) RS
III. T HE A NALYTICAL M ODELING FOR
R S R P I S AT RP V
NN-AMPPT M ETHOD ε= , φ= ,
nVt h (R S + R P ) nVt h (R S + R P )
A. PV Cell Model R S (I pc R P + I S AT R P )
The equivalent circuit of the typical PV cell model is shown ϕ=
nVt h (R S + R P )
in Fig. 3, n is the junction ideality factor and Vt h is the
thermal voltage (kT/q), I and V are the output current and In the above formula, I pc , R S , R P are all related to light
terminal voltage of the PV module, respectively. The electrical intensity. Thus, for different light intensities, different I-V
characteristics of a PV module can be expressed as [21]: relations can be obtained.
 (V +I R )  Moreover, Lambert W function has Taylor expansion:
S V + I RS
I = I pc − I S AT e nVth
−1 − (2) ∞

RP (−n)n−1 3 8
W (x) = x n = x − x 2 + x 3 − x 4 + · · · (7)
The output current I cannot be processed by the elementary n! 2 3
n=1
function to obtain an explicit expression. To this end, the Lam-
bert W function [29] is used to simplify the I-V equation. The So, (6) can be rewritten as follow:
Lambert W function is able to solve the solution of the class
I = α + βV + δW (εeφV +ϕ )
of transcendental functions of Y (x) = Xe(X ) , and the solution ∞
X is W (Y (x)). Thus, (1) should be rewritten to the form of  (−n)n−1 n nφV +nϕ
=δ (ε e ) + βV + α (8)
Y (x) = Xe(X ) shown as follow: n!
n=1
RS R S (I pc R P + I S AT R P − V )
(− I+ )
nVt h nVt h (R S + R P ) B. The SC Converter Analysis
R R S (I pc R P +I S AT R P −V )
− nVS I +
× e th nVth (R S +R P )
In most AMPPT methods based on NFC technique,
R (I R P +I S AT R P −V )
R S R P I S AT V
+ S pc SC converter shown in Fig. 7 is chose for IoT applica-
= e nVth nVth (R S +R P )
(3)
nVt h (R S + R P ) tions because of its high efficiency at low current levels
So and only two capacitors are needed to get the gain ratio
RS R S (I pc R P + I S AT R P − V ) of 3.
X =− I+ In steady state, the output current can be modeled as:
nVt h nVt h (R S + R P )
R (I R P +I S AT R P −V )
R S R P I S AT V
+ S pc 1
Y (x) = e nVth nVth (R S +R P )
(4) I OU T = f clk Q avg = C f clk (N V P H − Vout ) (9)
nVt h (R S + R P ) N −1
Because the solution X is W (Y (x)), then using the Lambert where N is the gain ratio, C is the capacitance used in each
W function to solve (4), the result is: stage, f clk is the switching frequency, and V P H and VOU T
RS R S (I pc R P + I S AT R P − V ) are the SC converter’s input and output voltages, respectively.
− I+
nVt h nVt h (R S + R P ) The input current can be modeled as:
R (I R P +I S AT R P −V )
R S R P I S AT V
+ S pc
= W( e nVth nVth (R S +R P )
) (5) I I N = N I OU T + IC P,L O S S
nVt h (R S + R P )
N
The explicit expression of the photovoltaic current obtained = C fclk (N V P H − Vout ) + λ1 fclk (10)
by solving (5) is: N −1
R P (I pc + I S AT ) − V where IC P,L O S S is the internal current loss of SC converter
I = that can be modeled by f clk × λ1 [30].
(R S + R P )
nVt h R S R P I S AT R (I R P +I S AT R P −V ) The current consumption which mainly comes from the
V
+ S pc
− W( e nVth nVth (R S +R P )
) VCO is proportional to the switching frequency:
RS nVt h (R S + R P )
= α + βV + δW (εeφV +ϕ ) (6) IV C O = λ2 f clk (11)

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WANG et al.: NEURAL NETWORK ASSISTANCE AMPPT SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM 5

The total current drawn from the PV cell thus equals to the
sum of I I N and IV C O :
N
I P H = I I N + IV C O = C fclk (N V P H −Vout )+λ f clk (12)
N −1
where λ = λ1 + λ2 .
Combining (8) and (12), it can be got:
N
C f clk (N V P H − Vout ) + λ f clk
N −1
∞
(−n)n−1 n nφV +nϕ Fig. 8. The principle of AMPPT method.
=δ (ε e ) + βV + α (13)
n!
n=1
Thus, the SC converter switching frequency can be calcu-
lated as follows:
∞
(−n)n−1 n nφV P H +nϕ
δ n! (ε e ) + βV P H + α
n=1
f clk = (14)
N−1 C(N V P H − Vout ) + λ
N

When V P H equals VM P P , the system is operating at the

maximum power point. The corresponding optimal frequency
is obtained by substituting VM P P for V P H in (14):

∞
(−n)n−1 n nφVM P P +nϕ
δ n! (ε e ) + βVM P P + α
n=1
fM P P =
N
N−1 C(N V M P P − Vout ) + λ
Compared to the traditional equations V P H - f clk and
VM P P - f M P P considered in reference [22], the improved NFC
model which includes (14) and (15) considers complete indica-
tors and is more general in guiding circuit design because (14)
and (15) do not contain the other unknown parameter Voc .
C. The Adaptive MPPT Analysis
According to reference [31], the input impedance of the SC
converter is negatively correlated with the switching frequency
f clk and the capacitor C. And output frequency fclk of the
VCO is positively related to control voltage V P H . At the
same, Rcp acts as a load of the PV cell, so there exist those
relationships among Rcp , V P H and fclk :
1 demands of the V-f relations when the PV cell has changed,
Rcp ∝
f clk
f clk ∝ VP H
VP H = I P H Rcp
Once V P H goes up, f clk will increase, and hence, the
input impedance of the SC converter will go down. Due
to the change of input impedance, voltage across the input
impedance V P H will go down correspondingly. Therefore,
PV cell, SC converter and VCO constitute a negative feedback
loop based on three relations (16), (17) and (18).
As shown in Fig. 8, the corresponding curve of V P H - f clk
characterized by (14) changes with the light intensity
changing. At the same time, all the points (VM P P , f M P P )
characterized by (15) constitutes a new curve under all light
intensity. Due to the negative feedback loop, the final state of
the whole system shown in Fig. 2 is the intersection of curve of
V P H - fclk and curve of V-f relation of the VCO. In summary,
Fig. 9. The whole structure of the BJT based VCO.
once a suitable VCO is designed specially to make sure its V-
(15) f relationship infinitely approach to optimal curve of (VM P P ,
f M P P ), when the whole loop attains steady state, the output
voltage of the PV cell and the switching frequency will fall
on the optimal state (VM P P , f M P P ) adaptively to ensure the
maximum power output no matter how the light intensity
changes.
IV. T HE D ESIGN P RINCIPLE OF THE BJT BASED VCO
According to the Section III, the optimal curve of (VM P P ,
f M P P ) as expressed in equation (15) has shown that there
is an exponential relationship between frequency and voltage.
Equation (15) is also the basis for VCO design, the closer the
V-f relationship of the VCO to (15), the better the tracking
effect. For this purpose, a BJT-based VCO with three off-chip
reconfigurable resistors-R0 , R1 , R2 is designed as shown in
Fig. 9. Those off-chip resistors can change to meet the different
(16)
which makes one designed circuit be able to track the MPPs
(17) of several PV cells.
(18) As shown in Fig. 9, the circuit consists of two parts: current
generator and frequency generator. Current generator has the
function of generating two types of current: the current I0 that
is exponentially related to the voltage V P H and the current
I1 that is linearly proportional to the voltage V P H . The base
and collector of the BJT are shorted, thus forming a diode
connection.
And I2 is the summation of I0 and I1 , so:
R1 V P H
R1 V P H
I2 = I0 + I1 = IS e VT (R1 +R0 ) + (19)
(R1 + R0 )R2
The frequency generator realizes the function of charging
and discharging of the capacitor C1 to generate a pulse square
wave of a certain frequency through the transmission gates T1 ,
T2 and the inverters (INV1∼INV3).

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As shown as Fig. 9, V can be obtained by KCL law as

follows:
VD VD
+ = I3 (21)
R3 R4
V P H − VD VD
= + I4 (22)
R3 R4
Therefore,
V P H R4 − I4 R3 R4 I3 R3 R4
V = V D(b) − V D(a) = − (23)
R3 + R4 R3 + R4
Combining (20) and (23):
I3 I3 1
f clk = = · V P H R4 −I3 R3 R4 I3 R3 R4
2 V C1 2C1
R3 +R4 − R3 +R4
Fig. 10. The waveform of the VCO. I3 R3 + R4
= · (24)
2C1 V P H R4 − 2I3 R3 R4
Because I3 is obtained by I2 mirroring through a current
In the initial stage, since there is no charge on capacitor C1 , mirror. Combining (19) and (21), the output frequency can be
the voltage across the C1 is zero, thus there are the following rewritten as:
states: points A, C, and D are low states, point B is high state. R1 V P H
R1
This conclusion can be obtained by reduction to absurdity. Is e (R0 +R1 )VT + (R0 +R 1 )R2
VP H R3 + R4
Assuming that point A is high at the beginning, then point C is f clk = · (25)
2C1 V P H R4 −2I3 R3 R4
high. The voltage across the capacitor C1 is not zero anymore,
due to the existence of R3 and R4 . This is in contradiction In the specific design, the same and small R3 and R4
with the initial charge of C1 being zero, so the assumption are chose to make sure the second term of the denominator
that point A is high is not true. I3 R3 R4 is much smaller than the first term V P H R4:
Then, I3 starts to charge C1 with a constant current, and R1 V P H

the potential of the upper plate of C1 (state of A) increases Is e (R0 +R1 )VT (R3 + R4 ) R1 (R3 + R4 )
f clk ≈ +
at the slope of I3 /C1 until the inversion voltage of INV1 is 2C1 V P H R4 (R0 + R1 )R3 R4
R1 V P H k1 V P H
reached, at which point B starts to turn to low, point C starts Is e (R0 +R1 )VT 2R1 Is e V T 2k1
to turn to high. So that point D also begins to turn to high, = + = + (26)
C1 V P H (R0 + R1 )R2 C1 V P H R2
because the voltage on capacitor C1 cannot change suddenly,
then point A rises instantaneously to make sure the voltage The R0 and R1 provides a divider ratio k1 to affect the
difference of C1 stays the same as the previous state. output frequency exponentially and R2 can affect the output
After that, the upper transfer gate T1 is closed, the lower frequency linearly.
transfer gate T2 is turned on, the charging process is com- As mentioned in Section II, equation (26) has the similar
pleted, and the discharge process starts. The voltage of point A form with (15) when the constant n in (15) takes the first
begins to decrease, point B remains low, and point C remains term, in other words, once those parameters (k1 , C1 , R2 ) are
high, so point D also remains high. Due to discharge, the chose specially, the BJT based VCO can meet the condition
voltage of the upper plate of C1 decreases at the slope of restricted by (15) to some extent. And those parameters can be
−I4 /C1 until the inversion voltage of INV1 is reached. Thus, confirmed by calculation and simulation before layout shown
point B turns to high, point C turns to low, and point D is also as Section V in detail.
low.
Since the C1 charge is conserved and cannot respond in a V. S IMULATION OF THE S OLAR E NERGY
short time, hence the voltage of point A rapidly turns to low. H ARVESTING S YSTEM
At this time, since point C goes low, the upper transfer gate A. The Neural Network Model
T1 is turned on, the lower transfer gate T2 is turned off, and
the charging process starts, so the cycle is repeated, so that The whole structure of the NN used in this paper is shown
a square wave can be obtained at the output terminal. In this in Fig. 11(a). In order to simulate the output current of the
circuit, the charge and discharge currents are designed to be PV cell to power the circuit, light intensity (LI) and V P H
equal, so the output waveform should be a pulse square wave are as the input variables, the output current (I P H ) is as the
with 50% duty cycle. The waveform of the points A, B, C, output variable. 3400 sets of sampling data are used to be as
D and f clk is shown as Fig. 10. training sets, 1700 sets are used to be as validation sets. And
The rise or fall of the voltage at point A is cyclical, so it the number of hidden nodes is 3 to get high fitness.
exists: As shown in Fig. 11(b), the RSquare same as SE mentioned
in Section II is a result that characterizes the accuracy of the
1 1 1 I3 fitness, the closer the RSquare is to 1, the higher the accuracy.
f clk = = V V
= V = (20)
T ( I3 + I4 )C1 2 I3 C1 2 V C1 The RSquare of the training and validation of this PV cell are

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WANG et al.: NEURAL NETWORK ASSISTANCE AMPPT SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM
Fig. 11. The result of the NN (a) The structure of the NN; (b) Training and
validation results of the NN.
Fig. 12. The whole energy harvesting system structure.
0.9977601 and 0.9975129 separately, which means that the
model can fit to the PV cell very precisely. The accuracy of
the NN model is much higher than the electrical equivalent
model used in reference [31].
B. The Co-Simulation Process of the Whole System
The whole energy harvesting system structure in this paper
is shown as Fig. 12.
Cbu f is the buffer capacitor and Cbs represents a superca-
pacitor or a battery [12]. Cbu f and the cap array (fly capacitors)
of the SC converter in the energy harvesting system are off-
chip. Meanwhile, Rload here refers to the variable equivalent
load that can consume more power than the effective power
obtained from PV cell. When the light is weak, Rload could
be the actual load or second stage DC-DC converter to power
sensitive load. When the light is sufficient, Rload is equivalent
to actual load and discharge load, ensuring that VOU T does
not rise higher than the desired voltage. Moreover, a compactor
with two voltage divider resisters and an adaptive body biasing
switch constitute the regulation path to ensure the VOU T be
regulated as well.
The detailed process of the co-simulation of the whole
system is as shown as Fig. 13. And the utilizing of the
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7
Fig. 13. The process of the co-simulation.
Fig. 14. The co-simulation blocks.
Fig. 15. The co-simulation results.
established NN model is aimed to determine the unknown
parameters (k1, C1 , R2 ) of the VCO. The co-simulation block
is shown as Fig. 14, the established NN model is written
into the MATLAB Function block, the circuit schematic of
the whole energy harvesting system designed in Virtuoso is
called through the SpectreRF Engine. I P H powers the circuit
and V P H is sampled back to NN as the input variable. Light
intensity as the other input variable of the NN model is an
artificially controllable variable. Thus, the light intensity can
be easily controlled to simulate the real condition to complete
the co-simulation of the whole system.
The detailed co-simulation process combing with the results
shown as Fig. 15 is as follows:
1. Use the sampling data of V P H × I P H and V P H to plot
the P-V relations of PV cell at different LIs shown as ①. The
Vr of the real MPP is within the range 1.521V-1.723V and the
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Fig. 16. Co-simulation waves.
Fig. 17. The V - f curves of the VCO (a) R2 is the axis variable; (b) k1 is
the axis variable.
Pr is within the range 3.7623mW-14.738mW when the light
intensity changes from 3000lux to 10000lux;
2. Find out the real MPP shown as ② and draw the straight
lines of V P H = Vr shown as ③;
3. Make the NFC loop in the open state (disconnect the
VCO in Fig. 12) and change the frequency f clk artificially at
different LIs to get the V-f curves shown as ④;
4. Get the intersections (Vr , fr ) shown as ⑤ of the V-f
curves and lines of V P H = Vr , which constitute the desired
Vr − fr curve;
5. Use Newton iteration method to solve the unknown
parameters (k1 , C1 , R2 ) of equation (26) to make it fit to
the desired Vr − fr curve;
6. Make the NFC loop in the closed state (connect the VCO
into the circuit) and use the solved parameters to check the
AMPPT and fine-tune the parameters to reduce the tracking
error further. The V-f curve of the fine-tuning VCO is shown
as ⑥, then the final simulating operation points of (Vs , fs ) is
shown as ⑦.
The solved parameters (k1 , C1 , R2 ) are (0.39, 276pF,
400K
). After fine tuning, the final parameters with the best
performance to simulate are (0.39, 300pF, 360K
). The co- the VCO used during testing is very closed to the solved and
simulation results of closed loop are shown in Fig. 16, the red
line is the output voltage (V P H ) of the PV cell, the pink line
is the switching frequency ( f clk ) and the purple line is the SC
converter’s output voltage (VOU T ). When the light intensity
changes from 10000lux to 3000lux, V P H can be stable at the
point which is closed to Vr compared to Fig. 14 at last. VOU T
is regulated to 4.2V to charge the battery. And the output of
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Fig. 18. Die photograph of the fabricated chip.
Fig. 19. Testing setup.
the VCO obviously changes when the controlling voltage V P H
changes.
For the reason that the C1 need to be integrated inside the
chip and only k1 , R2 can be changed by the way of off-chip
resisters. Fig. 17. (a) gives the scanning results of V-f curves
of the VCO when R2 is the axis variable and Fig. 17. (b) is
the result when k1 is the axis variable. It is obviously that
the value of k1 has great affect to the slope of the V-f curve
of the VCO and the value of R2 has effect to the magnitude
of the frequency. The combination of the characteristics of k1
and R2 ensures that the BJT based VCO can fit most Vr − fr
curves for different PV cells, which can improve the university
of the whole system.
VI. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
The solar energy harvesting circuit except for Cbu f and the
fly capacitors of the SC converter is implemented in 0.18μm
CMOS technology and its die photograph is shown in Fig. 18.
The testing setup is illustrated in Fig. 19. Two different PV
cells are tested with changing environment by adjusting the
light intensity of the xenon lamp.
As shown as Table. I, those parameters (k1 , C1 , R2 ) of
simulated ones. The reason for the difference among those
three results is mainly the approximation of the VCO model
and the process variation.
In order to verify the correct AMPPT procedure with the
light intensity changing. Fig. 20 (a) illustrates different track-
ing procedures for the light intensity changing from 3000lux to
10000lux. The blue one is the V P H of the PV cell 1 and the red
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WANG et al.: NEURAL NETWORK ASSISTANCE AMPPT SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF VCO FOR D ESIGN
Fig. 20. Experimental results (a) AMPPT procedure when light intensity
changes; (b) results of 3000lux; (c) results of 10000lux.
one is the f clk of the BJT based VCO. Obviously, the V P H can
be stable at the voltage closed to the MPPs found in Fig. 12.
Fig. 20(b) and Fig. 20(c) show the VOU T and fclk of 3000lux
and 10000lux respectively. At the same time, compared the
Fig. 20(a) with the Fig. 16, it is very intuitive that the f clk of
the test results and the co-simulation results are almost equal.
On the other hand, this is also a proof that the simulation
based on the NN model and co-simulation tool can simulate
the actual tracking procedure well before layout.
In order to ensure the VOU T be constant to 4.2V, the
equivalent load resistance Rload should not be larger than
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9
TABLE II
P ERFORMANCE S UMMARY
Fig. 21. Power efficiency comparison of different C f ly .
Rmax of every intensity that make the VOU T equal to 4.2V
exactly when the light intensity changes from 3000lux to
10000lux. Then The power efficiency of the whole system
can be calculated as follows:
POU T (i ) V 2 (i ) /Rmax (i )
P E(i ) = × 100% = OU T × 100%
PI N (i ) PM P P (i )
i = 1, 2 · · · N (27)
N is the number of the light intensities. VOUT is regulated
close to 4.2V to charge the battery or the super capacitor.
The output power of the PV cell can be expressed as PMPP
obtained through the NN model.
Fig. 21 gives out the power efficiencies with the off-chip
capacitors C f ly changing from 1nF to 3.3nF when the system
has tracked the MPP. It is obviously that the PE of 3.3nF C f ly
is the highest one among those three conditions. And the peak
efficiency is 89.39%@3000lux.
In order to test and verify the universality of the energy
harvesting system, two 4cm×4cm different commercial poly-
crystalline silicon PV cells are tested in this paper. Fig. 22 and
Fig. 23 have shown their tracking results respectively when the
C f ly is 2.2nF.
As can be seen from Fig. 22 and Fig. 23, the three lines Vr ,
Vs and Vt are almost overlapping, and the specific tracking
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10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS

TABLE III
C OMPARISON W ITH P RIOR A RTS

Table. III shows the comparison with prior arts. Com-

pared with the hill climbing method and time-based method
in [19], [24], [33] and [20], the proposed method has higher
efficiency for eliminating the power-hungry current sensor or
voltage sensor and other complicated control circuit. This
advantage is benefiting from the use of NFC loop to track
the MPPs. Meanwhile, compared with the conventional NFC
method in [21], [22] and [32], this proposed method has
higher precision, applicability and generality. On the one hand,
because the model, design and simulation methods are all
considered clearly to make the NFC method become more
Fig. 22. Tracking results of PV cell 1. suitable for industrialization in this paper. On the other hand,
the BIT based VCO is more advantageous in non-linear fitting
than the those designed in [21], [22] and [32]. Moreover,
compared with all those prior papers, the NN-A-AMPPT
method can test more light intensities during simulation to
ensure the correctness of the pre-design.

Fig. 23. Tracking results of PV cell 2.
errors are shown in Table. II. Due to process variation, there
is a certain degree of error between the simulation f clk ( f s
in two figures) and testing f clk ( f t in two figures). It can be
derived from the Table. I that tracking errors of two PV cells
are within the range of 0.01-0.51% and 0.01-0.5%.
The main advantages of the proposed NN-A-AMPPT
method are low circuit complexity, high tracking accuracy
and the convenience of simulating light intensity changes.
VII. C ONCLUSION
An NN-A-AMPPT method for solar energy harvesting
system based on the improved AMPPT model and the
co-simulation tool with NN model has been proposed in
this paper. The main purpose of this paper is to make the
AMPPT method become suitable for industrial realization,
and detailed modeling process, specific circuit design, simula-
tion and implementation of this high-accuracy NN-A-AMPPT
method are completely considered. It successfully achieves a
peak efficiency about 89.39%@ 3000lux of PV cell 1 when
the off-chip C f ly is 3.3nF and voltage tracking errors of 0.01-
0.51% (PV cell 1) and 0.01-0.5% (PV cell 2) when the light
intensity is changing from 3000lux to 10000lux by turning the
tunable xenon lamp. In summary, the proposed NN-A-AMPPT
method has the advantages of high precision, applicability and
generality.

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WANG et al.: NEURAL NETWORK ASSISTANCE AMPPT SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM
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Yuanfei Wang (Student Member, IEEE) received
the B.S. degree in microelectronics and solid-state
electronics from the University of Electronic
Science and Technology, Chengdu, China, in 2015,
where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree.
His research interest includes microwatt
solar energy harvesting system for Internet of
Things (IoT) and power management integrated
circuits.
Ping Luo (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees in automatic control and automated
industry from Chongqing University in 1990 and
1993, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in circuits
and systems from the University of Electronic Sci-
ence and Technology of China in 2004. She is cur-
rently a Professor with the University of Electronic
Science and Technology of China.
Her research interests include the technologies of
high efficiency of DC-DC converter, design of power
management unit, and energy harvesting ICs.
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12
Xiao Zeng (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees in mechantronics engineering from
Xihua University, Chengdu, China, in 2003 and
2007, respectively, the Ph.D. degree in microelec-
tronics and solid-state electronics from the Uni-
versity of Electronic Science and Technology of
China (UESTC) in 2018.
He is currently with UESTC. His research interests
include broad areas of power electronics, industrial
embedded measuring and controlling systems, fail-
ure analysis of semiconductor devices, and ICs.
Dingming Peng received the B.S. degree in elec-
tronic science and technology from Southwest
Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, in 2013, and
the M.S. degree in microelectronics and solid state
electronics from the University of Electronic Science
and Technology, Chengdu, China, in 2017.
His research interest includes microwatt energy
harvesting and power management integrated cir-
cuits.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Zhaoji Li (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree
from the University of Electronic Science and
Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China,
in 1963. He joined UESTC in 1963, where he was
a Lector, an Associate Professor, and a Professor.
He has authored more than 80 articles published on
several journals. He is currently the Vice Director of
the Academy of Power Electronics of Sichuan.
His research interests include semiconductor
device physics, semiconductor power devices, and
IC technologies.
Bo Zhang (Senior Member, IEEE) received the
B.Sc. degree in electronics engineering from the
Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China,
in 1985, and the M.S. degree from the University
of Electronic Science and Technology of China
(UESTC), Chengdu, China, in 1988.
He is currently a Professor with UESTC, where
he is also the Director with the Center for Inte-
grated Circuits. He has authored or coauthored more
than 350 publications in peer reviewed journals
and international conference. He holds more than
300 Chinese patents and 8 U.S patents. He was awarded the Second Prize
of State Scientific and Technological Progress of China in 2010. He is an
Associate Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON E LECTRON D EVICES .