The ‘Internet of Things-(IoT)’ envisions a world scattered with physical sensors that collect and transmit data about almost anything and thereby enabling intelligent decision-making for a smart environment. While technological advancements have reduced the power consumption of such devices significantly, the problem of perpetual energy supply beyond the limited capability of batteries is a bottleneck to this vision which is yet to be resolved. This issue has surged the research to investigate the prospect of harvesting the energy out of ambient mechanical vibrations. However, limited applications of conventional resonant devices under most practical environments involving frequency varying inputs, has gushed the research on wideband transducers recently. To facilitate multi-frequency operation at low-frequency regime, design innovations of the Silicon-onInsulator based MEMS suspension systems are performed through multi-modal activation. For continuous bandwidth widening, the benefits of using nonlinear stiffness in the system dynamics are investigated. By topologically varying the spring architectures, dramatically improved operational bandwidth with large power-density is obtained, which is benchmarked using a novel figure-of-merit. However, the fundamental phenomenon of multi-stability limits many nonlinear oscillator based applications including energy harvesting. To address this, an electrical control mechanism is introduced which dramatically improves the energy conversion efficiency over a wide bandwidth in a frequencyamplitude varying environment using only a small energy budget. The underlying effects are independent of the device-scale and the transduction methods, and are explained using a modified Duffing oscillator model. One of the key requirements for fully integrated electromagnetic transducers is the CMOS compatible batch-fabrication of permanent magnets with large energy-product. In the final module of the works, nano-structured CoPtP hard-magnetic material with large coercivity is developed at room-temperature using a current modulated electro-deposition technique. The demagnetization fields of the magnetic structures are minimized through optimized micro-patterns which enable the full integration of high performance electromagnetic energy harvesters.
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