An organic integrated capacitive DC-DC up-converter

In this paper a fully integrated organic DC-DC up-converter is presented in a pentacene p-type only technology. This 3-stage Dickson converter reaches a voltage conversion factor of 3 for a purely capacitive load and 2.5 for a 10 μA load current. The maximal output voltage goes up to 75 V and the Dickson core efficiency is 48 %. The clock signal is generated on-chip with a 9-stage ring oscillator, built with zero-V_gs load inverters. A tunable input voltage provides a tuning range of 30 %. The presented converter is designed for the on-chip generation of voltages for biasing a capacitive load. This converter draws 560 μA from a 20 V supply voltage. The chip area measures 2.8×2.1 mm². This converter fulfills a direct need for bias voltages beyond the supply voltage that is uncovered in recent work on organic circuits.