The emergence and evolution of energy micro-generators during the last 2 decades has delivered a wealth of energy harvesting powering solutions, with the capability of exploiting a wide range of motion types, from impulse and low frequency irregular human motion, to broadband vibrations and ultrasonic waves. It has also created a wide background of engineering energy microsytems, including fabrication methods, system concepts and optimal functionality. This overview presents a simple description of the main transduction mechanisms employed, namely the piezoelectric, electrostatic, electromagnetic and triboelectric harvesting concepts. A separate discussion of the mechanical structures used as motion translators is presented, including the employment of a proof mass, cantilever beams, the role of resonance, unimorph structures and linear/rotational motion translators. At the mechanical-to-electrical interface, the concepts of impedance matching, pre-biasing and synchronised switching are summarised. The separate treatment of these three components of energy microgenerators allows the selection and combination of different operating concepts, their co-design towards overall system level optimisation, but also towards the generalisation of specific approaches, and the emergence of new functional concepts. Industrial adoption of energy micro-generators as autonomous power sources requires functionality beyond the narrow environmental conditions typically required by the current state-of-art. In this direction, the evolution of broadband electromechanical oscillators and the combination of environmental harvesting with power transfer operating schemes could unlock a widespread use of micro-generation in microsystems such as micro-sensors and micro-actuators.

在过去的 20 年里，能量微型发电机的出现和演变提供了丰富的能量收集供电解决方案，能够利用广泛的运动类型，从脉冲和低频不规则人体运动，到宽带振动和超声波波浪。它还创造了工程能源微系统的广泛背景，包括制造方法、系统概念和最佳功能。本概述简要介绍了所采用的主要转换机制，即压电、静电、电磁和摩擦电收集概念。单独讨论了用作运动转换器的机械结构，包括使用质量块、悬臂梁、共振的作用、unimorph 结构和线性/旋转运动转换器。在机械-电气接口处，总结了阻抗匹配、预偏置和同步切换的概念。能量微型发电机的这三个组件的单独处理允许不同操作概念的选择和组合，它们的协同设计朝向整体系统级优化，而且朝向特定方法的泛化，以及新功能概念的出现。能源微型发电机作为自主电源的工业采用需要超出当前最先进技术通常要求的狭窄环境条件的功能。在这个方向，