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CMOS Circuits for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Advanced Microelectronics ((MICROELECTR.,volume 38))

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Abstract

In the last few years, energy harvesters have decreased in size, and at the same time increased their output power. In the last few years, energy harvesters have decreased in size, and at the same time increased their output power. These properties make energy harvesting attractive for powering wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) which are originally battery powered, with the goal of prolongating their lifetime. This chapter starts with a rough review of the main energy harvesting mechanisms, covering the thermoelectric, radio frequency (RF) and vibration based principles. For each mechanism, some representative application examples are shown, followed by possible applications of these conversion mechanisms in WSNs are presented. After that, a detailed review of the state of the art in interface circuits for vibration based energy harvesters is given. Therefore, the interface circuits are separated in two categories, one of them focusing on efficient AC/DC conversion, and the others incorporating impedance matching methods. In order to classify the major achievements of the proposed interface circuit, a list of aspects which should be fulfilled when designing general interface circuitry for energy harvesters is given. Based on this list, the major achievements of this work are then discussed. This chapter ends up with a brief description of the organization of the book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Usually, the term energy harvester or energy scavenger is used for a microscale device converting small amounts of ambient energy into electrical energy. In the broader sense, such a device is of course a generator, and sometimes is referred to as a converter or a transducer as well. In this book, the terms energy harvester and generator are used as synonyms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HSG-IMIT–Institute of Micromachining and Information Technology, Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany

    Thorsten Hehn

  2. Department of Microsystems Engineering, University of Freiburg–IMTEK, Freiburg, Germany

    Yiannos Manoli

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  1. Thorsten Hehn
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  2. Yiannos Manoli
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Correspondence to Thorsten Hehn .

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Hehn, T., Manoli, Y. (2015). Introduction. In: CMOS Circuits for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters. Springer Series in Advanced Microelectronics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9288-2_1

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