An Active Voltage Doubling Rectifier with Unbalanced-Biased Comparators for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters

For wearable health monitoring systems, a fundamental problem is the limited space for storing energy, which can be translated into a short operational life. In this paper, a highly efficient active voltage doubling rectifier with a wide input range for micro-piezoelectric energy harvesting systems is proposed. To obtain a higher output voltage, the Dickson charge pump topology is chosen in this design. By replacing the passive diodes with unbalanced-biased comparator-controlled active counterparts, the proposed rectifier minimizes the voltage losses along the conduction path and solves the reverse leakage problem caused by conventional comparator-controlled active diodes. To improve the rectifier input voltage sensitivity and decrease the minimum operational input voltage, two low power common-gate comparators are introduced in the proposed design. To keep the comparator from oscillating, a positive feedback loop formed by the capacitor C is added to it. Based on the SMIC 0.18-μm standard CMOS process, the proposed rectifier is simulated and implemented. The area of the whole chip is 0.91×0.97 mm2, while the rectifier core occupies only 13% of this area. The measured results show that the proposed rectifier can operate properly with input amplitudes ranging from 0.2 to 1.0V and with frequencies ranging from 20 to 3000 Hz. The proposed rectifier can achieve a 92.5% power conversion efficiency (PCE) with input amplitudes equal to 0.6 V at 200 Hz. The voltage conversion efficiency (VCE) is around 93% for input amplitudes greater than 0.3 V and load resistances larger than 20kΩ.

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Cite this article

[IEEE Style]

L. Liu, J. Mu, W. Yuan, W. Tu, Z. Zhu, Y. Yang, "An Active Voltage Doubling Rectifier with Unbalanced-Biased Comparators for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters," Journal of Power Electronics, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1226-1235, 2016. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2016.16.3.1226.

[ACM Style]

Lianxi Liu, Junchao Mu, Wenzhi Yuan, Wei Tu, Zhangming Zhu, and Yintang Yang. 2016. An Active Voltage Doubling Rectifier with Unbalanced-Biased Comparators for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters. Journal of Power Electronics, 16, 3, (2016), 1226-1235. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2016.16.3.1226.