A Synchronized Switch Harvesting Rectifier With Reusable Storage Capacitors for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Synchronized ac–dc rectifiers are widely used for energy rectification in piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH), which have to employ a bulky inductor or some dedicated flying capacitors for high energy conversion efficiency. This article proposes a synchronized switch harvesting on shared capacitors (SSHSC) rectifier achieving synchronized voltage flipping without inductors or dedicated flying capacitors for PEH. The proposed SSHSC rectifier employs only three energy-storage capacitors with a specific capacitance ratio (3:3:1). These three capacitors mainly serve as storage capacitors; they can also be reused as flying capacitors for bias-flip operations. Thanks to the capacitor-sharing technique, this SSHSC rectifier takes a small volume and fewer I/O pads compared to prior SSHC rectifiers. This design was fabricated in a 180-nm BCD process, and the measured results show 78% voltage flipping efficiency and 7.58 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> power enhancement.