Low Power Electrostatic Energy Harvesting System Ic

This paper presents the design of a novel low power electrostatic energy harvesting integrated circuit in AMI 0.7たm high voltage CMOS process. To increase the output power extracted from a variable capacitor acting as a mechanical to electrical energy converter, a novel controller unit is proposed to synchronize the operation of the energy harvesting circuit (EHC) with the motion of the capacitor’s plates. The converter consists of parallel steel plates, with a variable capacitance between 250pF-850pF and resonance frequency of 27Hz. Simulation results show a net harvested power of 332.7nW at resonance. The energy harvested and losses of the combined EHC and controller IC cores attribute to about 54% and 30% of the system power budget respectively.