A 150mV-1.2V fully-integrated DC-DC converter for Thermal Energy Harvesting

Author

Bassi, Giovanni ; Colalongo, Luigi ; Richelli, Anna ; Kovács-Vajna, Zsolt

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf. Eng., Univ. of Brescia, Brescia, Italy

fYear

2012

fDate

20-22 June 2012

Firstpage

331

Lastpage

334

Abstract

A fully-integrated DC/DC converter for energy harvesting applications is presented. The startup-voltage of the converter is about 140mV, the output voltage exceeds 1.5V, with a power efficiency at least 20%. The architecture for boosting such extremely low voltages is based on an ultra-low-voltage oscillator cross connected to two phase charge pump. The overall circuit does not require any external components and can be fully integrated in a standard CMOS low voltage technology. A test-chip has been designed in UMC 0.18μm process.

Keywords

CMOS analogue integrated circuits; DC-DC power convertors; charge pump circuits; energy harvesting; oscillators; UMC process; fully-integrated DC-DC converter; power efficiency; size 0.18 mum; standard CMOS low voltage technology; test-chip; thermal energy harvesting; two phase charge pump; ultralow-voltage oscillator; voltage 150 mV to 1.2 V; Charge pumps; DC-DC power converters; Energy harvesting; Inductors; Integrated circuit modeling; Low voltage; Oscillators;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Power Electronics, Electrical Drives, Automation and Motion (SPEEDAM), 2012 International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Sorrento

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1299-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SPEEDAM.2012.6264597

Filename

6264597