A Novel Rectifier Design for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Using Cross-Coupled Topology

In this work, a novel rectifier topology is proposed for vibration-based energy harvesting systems using piezoelectric materials. The power extracted from piezoelectric material takes the form of AC power which is not suitable for directly feeding to the loads because of the time-varying signal. To overcome this challenge, a rectifier is used to convert power from AC to DC. Due to the very low-level output of piezoelectric materials, it is imperative for the rectifier to maintain a high level of efficiency to effectively harness the available energy. The proposed rectifier topology improves power conversion efficiency and reduces the number of comparators. Due to the proposed topology, this novel rectifier circuit is able to completely start up in low-level vibrations as well as in the high-level vibrations. The complete design has been implemented in a 65 nm CMOS process, demonstrating the practical applications of the proposed systems. Simulation results present that the cross-coupled topology achieves a power harvesting efficiency of more than 97%.