MEMS based Transducer for Zero-Energy Standby Application

The advent of IoT (Internet of Things) is tremendously pushing the development of wireless Sensor network (WSN). This is a quite promising technology that enables endless different applications, for sensing and monitoring of several kinds of infrastructures as in the context of industry 4.0. The most attractive characteristic of a WSN is that it is very easy to install by simply using battery-driven and in rare cases battery-free wireless sensor nodes. Moreover the equipment is rather low cost and the main saving is that the heavy installation work for wiring the power rails is not needed and this provides a further advantage in freedom and versatility for the optimum placement of the sensor nodes. Nevertheless, the main problem of WSN is still how to power the nodes in a cost effective way, especially when those are battery-driven since the maintenance cost to replace or recharge the batteries may be high. One of the possible solutions is to increase battery life by reducing unnecessary energy consumption as much as possible. In many applications standby energy consumption is unnecessary and in this paper we aim to show how to null it by using a kinetic-to-electrical energy transduction based on MEMS technology for all use cases involving vibrations. It will be shown how a MEMS device, used as energy transducer, can provide enough energy to turn on a completely off device.