Self-powered High-performance Full-wave Rectifier with a Vibration Detection Function for Energy Harvesting Applications

In this paper, a full-wave rectifier (FWR) with a simple vibration detector is presented for vibrational energy harvesting systems. Conventional output-powered active FWRs consume power from the harvested energy even when the system is not harvesting any energy. To overcome the problem, a technique using a simple vibration detector consisting of a peak detector and a level converter is proposed. The vibration detector detects whether vibrational energy exists in the input terminal and disables the FWR when there is no vibrational energy. The proposed FWR with the vibration detector is designed using a 0.35-mu m CMOS process. The measurement results show that the proposed FWR rectifies input signals with amplitudes in the range of 1.4-3.3 V with a maximum power efficiency of 97% and voltage efficiency over 99%. The rectifier can operate with input signals in the frequency range of 5 Hz-10 kHz. Compared with the rectifier without the vibration detector, a decrease in leakage current by approximately 20 times can be achieved by using the proposed vibration detector. The proposed rectifier does not require any off-chip components to enable full chip integration, and the die area of the proposed circuit is 338 mu m x 460 mu m without pads.