An Integrated High-Performance Active Rectifier for Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting Systems

In this letter, a highly efficient active full-bridge rectifier is proposed for piezoelectric (PE) vibration energy harvesting systems. By replacing the passive diodes with an operational amplifier-controlled active counterpart and adding a switch in parallel with the transducer, the proposed rectifier solves the dc-offset problem of the comparator-based active diode, minimizes the voltage drop along the conduction path, and extracts more power from the transducer, all of which lead to better power extraction and conversion capability. The proposed rectifier, implemented in 0.18-μm CMOS technology, shows 90% power conversion efficiency and 81 μW output power, with values corresponding to 1.5 times and 3.4 times the values for a conventional full-bridge rectifier.