Intelligent management and control of received wireless power

The concept of powering a remote device without wires is known as a wireless power transfer system. Some applications employ batteries while others use storage capacitors instead. In either case, it is necessary to transfer enough power to enable the receiver to do the required work. This paper presents an intelligent algorithm to manage received wireless power to do useful work even though there is insufficient power to do the work directly. The example ultra-low power microcontroller discussed here is the ATTiny85 although the approach is applicable to a whole family of similar micros. The algorithm used makes intelligent decisions whether to sleep or wake according to the amount of received and stored energy. Using an adaptive strategy of this kind the amount of work can be precisely matched to the resources available to achieve maximum utilization. The paper also evaluates the performance of the proposed algorithm compared with more conventional ways of doing the same thing.