A Low-Power CMOS Piezoelectric Transducer Based Energy Harvesting Circuit for Wearable Sensors for Medical Applications

Piezoelectric vibration based energy harvesting systems have been widely utilized and researched as powering modules for various types of sensor systems due to their ease of integration and relatively high energy density compared to RF, thermal, and electrostatic based energy harvesting systems. In this paper, a low-power CMOS full-bridge rectifier is presented as a potential solution for an efficient energy harvesting system for piezoelectric transducers. The energy harvesting circuit consists of two n-channel MOSFETs (NMOS) and two p-channel MOSFETs (PMOS) devices implementing a full-bridge rectifier coupled with a switch control circuit based on a PMOS device driven by a comparator. With a load of 45 kΩ, the output rectifier voltage and the input piezoelectric transducer voltage are 694 mV and 703 mV, respectably, while the VOUT versus VIN conversion ratio is 98.7% with a PCE of 52.2%. The energy harvesting circuit has been designed using 130 nm standard CMOS process.