A Piezoelectric Energy Harvester with High Efficiency and Low Circuit Complexity

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents an efficient vibration energy harvester with a piezoelectric (PE) cantilever. The proposed PE energy harvester increases the efficiency through minimization of hardware complexity and hence reduction of power dissipation of the circuit. Two key features of the proposed energy harvester are (i) incorporation synchronized switches with a simple control circuit, and (ii) a feedforward buck converter with a simple control circuit. The chip was fabricated in 0.18 µm CMOS processing technology, and the measured results indicate that the proposed rectifier achieves the efficiency of 77%. The core area of the chip is 0.2 mm2.Index Terms-Active rectifier, feed-forward buck converter, high efficiency rectifier, piezoelectric energy harvester, synchronized switch rectifier.