Design and simulation of SOI-MEMS electrostatic vibration energy harvester for micro power generation

The micro power generation using vibration energy sources appears to be attractive due to its applicability on many situations and environmental conditions. The electrostatic energy harvester has various advantageous over piezoelectric and electromagnetic systems such as reduction in fabrication process complexity and cost, feasibility on MEMS and IC integration, improves the possibility level of integration with silicon based microelectronics and produce voltage within the usable range which can obviating the need of large and expensive generator. This paper presents the design and simulation of SOI-MEMS electrostatic vibration energy harvester using the architect module in CoventorWare2010. Simulation results shows that the newly proposed electrostatic energy harvesting system can produce maximum output power of 5.891µW when the excitation frequency is 2 kHz.