A compact self-powered inductor-less piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit using gyrator

Abstract

In traditional low-frequency energy harvesting circuits, a large matched inductor with a large size is unavoidable. To reduce the size of the circuit, this paper proposes a compact self-powered inductor-less high-efficiency piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit using a low-power-consumption gyrator. A self-powered floating gyrator inductor (FGI) is used in place of an inductor in the proposed circuit, and the required phasor response is acquired by using its voltage-current (V-I) relationship. The proposed circuit offers easy adjustability and performance benefits in small integrated circuits (IC) packages. The proposed circuit can be cost-effective and provide reduced area advantages in autonomous self-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) and wireless sensor nodes (WSN) applications. Regarding harvested energy, the proposed circuit with a storage capacitor of 0.24F can obtain 320% improved performance than standard energy harvesting (SEH) along with the lowest power consumption of 0.25µW in self-powered operation. The proposed technique can also be applied to similar piezoelectric energy harvesting strategies with large inductors.