Storing MEMS Interfaces Without Electrical Auxiliary Energy for Long-Time Monitoring

Two thoroughly integrated sensor node interfaces for the storage of mechanical and electrical measures are demonstrated. For long-time monitoring tasks, the continuous accessibility of electrical auxiliary energy is often critical, as the sensing device has to be on standby, even if the measures of interest - extremal values, integrals or total numbers of events - are retrospectively of interest, only. Novel mechanical or nanoionic interfaces allow storing these measures by using the inherently available energy from the measures. Any kind of acceleration, force or pressure provides sufficient mechanical energy to extract and store quantitative results in a mechanical MEMS storage whereas electrical energy, e.g. from piezo sensors or photoelectric elements can be stored in a nanoionic memory. Interfaces for both concepts exemplified for inertial sensors are described and demonstrated here.