Electronic – Power microcontroller from super capacitor

capacitormicrocontrollerpower supply

I have a uC that works with 1.8V up to 3.3V. Current consumption is at about 20uA in sleep mode and about 12 mA in active state. The uC will enter active state for about 100 ms every minute.

So I am trying to power this from a Vishay super cap: 15F at 2.8 volts with an ESR of 1.2O at 1kHz.

Math says I can pull about 4.10 mA from this cap before its voltage drops to 1.8 volts, at which point the micro will shut down.

So.. the question: am I missing something? Should I add a small electrolytic between the super cap and the micro? A small zener to limit eventual (possible?) spikes in voltage? Should I add a buck boost converter to get a bit more out of the capacitor?

Also.. if I disable brownout detection on the microcontroller, maybe I can pull something like 10% more charge from the capacitor? I can implement error checking in case the micro outputs gibberish, which usually happens in low voltage scenarios with brownout detection disabled.

Best Answer

From your parameters, your supercap would discharge in 1848 seconds to 1.8v under a constant 12mA draw.

$$Bt(seconds) = C(Vcapmax - Vcapmin) / Imax$$

If it's only active for 100ms every minute it has a duty cycle of:

$$100ms / 60000ms = 0.0016667%$$

It would last ~1.1 million minutes, or about two years. That is excluding the sleep mode draw however. At 20uA, interestingly enough your total active mode power consumption would be about the same as your total sleep mode power consumption, so we can easily estimate that including the sleep mode (which will be 99.84443% of the total time), your device will last for about a year from fully charged to 1.8v. You could extend this quite a bit by adding a high efficiency buck-boost, provided you don't add too many losses with it. Some modern boost converters can yield 1.8v out from as low as 0.25v in.