Synchronous conditioning circuits for piezo- and triboelectric harvesters in CMOS technologies

This focus paper proposed for the track “Energy Harvesting and Power Efficient Electronics” addresses the new generation of conditioning circuits based on active energy extraction techniques, designed by the term “synchronous conditioning circuits”. Initially proposed for enhancing energy yield of piezoelectric transducers having intrinsic poor quality, these techniques are now a part of the established method not only for piezoelectric devices, but also for triboelectric transducers. Their recent success is due to intensive use of integrated CMOS technologies optimized for low-energy power converters, which allowed to build highly efficient systems even in the case when the input energy is of few microwatts. This paper shortly reviews the synchronous energy extraction technique and their applications, and then discusses recent successful implementations in CMOS technologies.