A self-powered rectifier circuit for low-voltage energy harvesting applications

This paper presents a fully self-powered low voltage and low power active rectifier circuit for vibration-based electromagnetic (EM) energy harvesters. A passive AC/DC doubler is used to provide a supply voltage for the active rectifier circuit. The proposed circuit is designed using standard 90 nm TSMC CMOS technology. The simulation results show that the proposed active rectifier circuit has voltage conversion ratio higher than 150% when the input peak voltage is more than 100 mV at open-load condition. The maximum power conversion efficiency of the circuit is 92% with 500 mV input peak voltage and 40 kΩ load resistance. Moreover, the rectifier is able to operate with low frequency input signals commonly available from vibrational energy harvesters.