Piezoelectric Energy Harvester for a CMOS Wireless Sensor

The emerging of collective awareness platforms opened a new range of driven forces that will converge to more sustainable systems. To achieve this task, these platforms have to support an increasing number of more sophisticated remote sensors and actuators that will need to cooperate smartly and strongly with each other in a mesh type of intelligent interconnectivity. These remote smart miniaturized nodes can add noninvasive intelligence but suffer from lifetime performance due to the small quantity of energy available in micro batteries. Therefore, harvesting energy from the environment is a promising technique. This work presents the study and experimental evaluation of a flexible piezoelectric material to validate the use of a piezoelectric harvester in a CMOS wireless actuator/sensor node.