Significant performance improvement for micro-thermoelectric energy generator based on system analysis

Abstract This study presents a high-performance micro-thermoelectric generator (μ-TEG) optimized based on a system analysis. The system analysis indicates the thermal matching requirement for thermocouples dimension and array density to maximize the output power. With the measured performance of a reference device, the complicated thermal properties of various application environments can be easily derived, which are necessary parameters for thermal matching. The effect has been further proved by a CMOS-MEMS fabricated μ-TEG module for different applications. The wristwatch-TEG application produces 0.32 μW output power, realizing an improvement of three orders of magnitudes for the reported wristwatch-TEG device of the similar materials.