Duque Marcos, Leon-Salguero Edgardo, Sacristán Jordi, Esteve Jaume, Murillo Gonzalo
Department of Micro and Nanoengineering, Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona IMB-CNM (CSIC), Campus UAB Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain.
Postgrado en Nanotecnología, Universidad de Sonora (Unison), Hermosillo, Sonora 83000, Mexico.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Apr 21;19(8):1895. doi: 10.3390/s19081895.
The increasing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the rapid development of low-power sensors and wireless networks. However, there are still several barriers that make a global deployment of the IoT difficult. One of these issues is the energy dependence, normally limited by the capacitance of the batteries. A promising solution to provide energy autonomy to the IoT nodes is to harvest residual energy from ambient sources, such as motion, vibrations, light, or heat. Mechanical energy can be converted into electrical energy by using piezoelectric transducers. The piezoelectric generators provide an alternating electrical signal that must be rectified and, therefore, needs a power management circuit to adapt the output to the operating voltage of the IoT devices. The bonding and packaging of the different components constitute a large part of the cost of the manufacturing process of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and integrated circuits. This could be reduced by using a monolithic integration of the generator together with the circuitry in a single chip. In this work, we report the optimization, fabrication, and characterization of a vibration-driven piezoelectric MEMS energy harvester, and the design and simulation of a charge-pump converter based on a standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Finally, we propose combining MEMS and CMOS technologies to obtain a fully integrated system that includes the piezoelectric generator device and the charge-pump converter circuit without the need of external components. This solution opens new doors to the development of low-cost autonomous smart dust devices.
对物联网（IoT）日益增长的兴趣推动了低功耗传感器和无线网络的快速发展。然而，仍然存在一些障碍使得物联网的全球部署变得困难。其中一个问题是能源依赖，通常受电池电容的限制。为物联网节点提供能源自主性的一个有前景的解决方案是从环境源（如运动、振动、光或热）中收集残余能量。机械能可以通过使用压电换能器转换为电能。压电发电机提供一个交变电信号，该信号必须进行整流，因此需要一个电源管理电路来使输出适应物联网设备的工作电压。不同组件的键合和封装构成了微机电系统（MEMS）和集成电路制造过程成本的很大一部分。通过在单个芯片中将发电机与电路进行单片集成，可以降低这一成本。在这项工作中，我们报告了一种振动驱动的压电MEMS能量收集器的优化、制造和表征，以及基于标准互补金属氧化物半导体（CMOS）技术的电荷泵转换器的设计和仿真。最后，我们提出将MEMS和CMOS技术相结合，以获得一个完全集成的系统，该系统包括压电发电机装置和电荷泵转换器电路，无需外部组件。这种解决方案为低成本自主智能尘埃设备的开发打开了新的大门。
