A 40-nm CMOS Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting IC for Wearable Biomedical Applications

This investigation presents an energy harvesting IC (integrated circuit) for piezoelectric materials as a substitute for battery of a wearable biomedical device. It employs a voltage multiplier as first stage which uses water bucket fountain approach to boost the very low voltage generated by the piezoelectric. The boosted voltage was further improved by the boost DC/DC converter which follows a predefined timing control directed by the digital logic for the said converter to be operated efficiently. TSMC 40-nm CMOS process was used for implementation and fabrication of the energy harvesting IC. The chip’s core has an area of 0.013 mm2. With an output of 1 V which is enough to supply the wearable biomedical devices, it exhibited the highest pump gain and accommodated the lowest piezoelectric generated voltage among recent related works.