A novel angular SiO2 electret-based electrostatic energy harvester for cardiac and neural implants

Energy harvesting as an alternate power source in miniaturized implantable medical devices, especially cardiac and neural implants has been investigated. An electret-based angular electrostatic energy harvester has been proposed along with a power management control circuit to harvest maximum possible energy. The proposed harvester incorporates the properties of both area-overlap and gap closing topologies to achieve larger capacitance variation with respect to displacement as is observed in the results. The maximum power that can be scavenged from the proposed harvester of size 2.5 × 3.5 mm2 at maximum displacement is 9.6 μW