A MEMS Vibratory Energy Harvester Charged by an Off-Chip Electret

This paper reports a MEMS vibratory energy harvester using an off-chip electret source. The proposed device allows, for the first time, to physically separate MEMS tunable capacitors and electret charge source in a MEMS electret energy harvester, which enables us to enhance the design and fabrication flexibility of both MEMS structures and electret. A proof-of-concept device is fabricated, and its performance is experimentally evaluated. The results confirm the energy harvesting operation of the proposed device architecture.