Approaches to transient computing for energy harvesting systems: A quantitative evaluation

Systems operating from harvested sources typically integrate batteries or supercapacitors to smooth out rapid changes in harvester output. However, such energy storage devices require time for charging and increase the size, mass and cost of the system. A recent approach to address this is to power systems directly from the harvester output, termed transient computing. To solve the problem of having to restart computation from the start due to power-cycles, a number of techniques have been proposed to deal with transient power sources. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate three state-of-the-art approaches on a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller characterizing the application scenarios where each performs best. Finally, recommendations are provided to system designers for selecting the most suitable approach.