Self-starting power management circuits for piezoelectric and electret-based electrostatic mechanical energy harvesters

This paper reports on an innovative power management circuit for piezoelectric and electret-based mechanical energy harvesters able to self-start and to power battery-free Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) from scratch without any initial energy. The key elements of this circuit are a depletion-mode MOSFET combined with self-powered Schmitt triggers that enable to switch between (i) a non-optimized passive diode-bridge-capacitor configuration to start the system and (ii) an active power conversion path to maximize the energy extraction from mechanical energy harvesters. A discrete circuit implementing this architecture is presented and its operation is validated on simple piezoelectric and electret-based devices. An ASIC, based on the same architecture, has finally been designed, fabricated and validated.