A development tool for design and analysis of MEMS based EM energy scavengers

This paper presents a development tool for estimating the performance of an electromagnetic (EM) vibration-to-electrical MEMS energy scavenger for low power mobile computing and wireless sensor applications. The tool takes design and excitation parameters as input, and estimates output voltage waveforms and power levels. It has been correlated against validation data, and used for early evaluation and design of new MEMS modules, which could not be optimized using off-the-shelf design packages. The tool was used to optimize the second generation MEMS scavenger with more than three orders of magnitude efficiency improvement compared to first generation, in converting low frequency (70-150 Hz) environmental vibrations to electrical energy. The predicted gains have later been verified on a macro-scale prototype. To our knowledge, this tool is a first of its kind.