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Environmentally responsible and minimal natural variation in electric power generation has been a goal of researchers for several decades. With the establishment of the electrical power generation potential from microalgae’s photosynthesis, several researchers revealed interesting microbial fuel cell configurations to improve the output of electrical parameters. However, little work is done to understand the electrical charge collected from photosynthesis. This article proposes a fuel cell-based electrochemical modeling of the micro-photosynthetic power cell. The model is developed, excluding significant analytical assumptions at stationary conditions. Due to the complexity of modeling the electron release from photosynthesis, the electron release reactions are substituted with a simpler redox coupler of similar electric potential to that of photosynthesis. The micro-photosynthetic power cell revealed that the electron collection rate does not directly correlate to the photosynthesis electron chain. It might remain constant for a specific electrical load. The peak power is obtained at a different operating loading than the internal resistance of the device. The experimental open circuit voltage ($\sim$0.96V) and the peak power ($\sim$0.18mW) are predicted accurately by this modeling approach. The results show that the fill factor remains constant with respect to several effective electrode surface areas. Based on this theoretical modeling, we believe that with optimized algal physiological state and micro-photosynthetic power cell’s effective surface area, this micro-photosynthetic power cell will be useful for application in low-power applications.

A new modeling and parameter extraction methodology to represent the parasitic effects associated with shielded test structures is presented in this paper. This methodology allows to accurately account for the undesired effects introduced by the test fixture when measuring on-wafer devices at high frequencies. Since the proposed models are based on the physical effects associated with the structure, the obtained parameters allow the identification of the most important parasitic components, which lead to potential measurement uncertainty when characterizing high-frequency devices. The proposed methodology is applied to structures fabricated on different metal levels in order to point out the advantages and disadvantages in each case. The validity of the modeling and characterization methodology is verified by achieving excellent agreement between simulations and experimental data up to 50 GHz.