A Fully Energy-Autonomous Temperature-to-Time Converter Powered by a Triboelectric Energy Harvester for Biomedical Applications

This article presents a fully energy-autonomous temperature-to-time converter (TTC), entirely powered up by a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) for biomedical applications. Existing sensing systems either consume too much power to be sustained by energy harvesting or have poor accuracy. Also, the harvesting of low-frequency energy input has been challenging due to high reverse leakage of a rectifier. The proposed dynamic leakage suppression full-bridge rectifier (DLS-FBR) reduces the reverse leakage current by more than 1000 $\times $ , enabling harvesting from sparse and sporadic energy sources; this enables the TTC to function with a TENG as the sole power source operating at $\mu \text{m}$ 1P6M CMOS technology, consuming 0.14 pJ/conversion with 0.014-ms conversion time.