Autonomous and self-starting efficient micro energy harvesting interface with adaptive MPPT, buffer monitoring, and voltage stabilization

This paper presents an efficient autonomous micro energy harvesting interface optimized for high-resistive vibration-driven electromagnetic energy transducers. A novel active voltage doubler and an energy processing scheme with adaptive maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is implemented. The interface enables wide voltage range harvesting for amplitudes between 0.44 V and 4.15V. Harvesting with tracking efficiencies of up to 93% and total efficiencies of up to 72% is enabled. In order to supply energy harvesting applications such as low power wireless sensor nodes a programmable voltage stabilization is implemented. The prototype chip is fabricated in a 0.35 μm CMOS process and is self-supplied needing no start-up help.