Piezo-powered floating gate injector for self-powered fatigue monitoring in biomechanical implants

— In this paper we describe an implementation and modeling of a novel fatigue monitoring sensor based on integration of piezoelectric transduction with floating gate avalanche injection. The miniaturized sensor enables continuous battery-less monitoring and failure predictions of biomechanical implants. Measured results from a fabricated prototype in a 0.5µm CMOS process demonstrate excellent agreement with the theoretical model in computing cumulative statistics of electrical signals generated by the piezoelectric transducer. The power dissipation of the sensor is less than 1µW which makes it attractive for integration with biocompatible poly-vinylidene diflouride (PVDF) based transducers.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCAS
• Authors: Nizar Lajnef, Shantanu Chakrabartty, Niell Elvin, Alex Elvin
• Keywords: Fatigue Monitoring Sensor, ISCAS 2007, Miniaturized Sensor Enables, Piezoelectric Transduction