Switched-capacitor DC/DC converters for empowering Internet-of-Things SoCs

The development of wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) as well as the rise of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) push ahead the research effort in ultra-low-power integrated circuits. Jointly with the recent development of micro-energy harvesters, it extends the battery lifetime of IoT nodes. Nevertheless, the power extracted by such energy harvesters does not provide a large power budget so that circuits in IoT nodes are highly duty cycled. In this paper we study switched-capacitor DC/DC converters as a solution for empowering such IoT nodes in a SoC integration. We specifically give insights about their sizing and show that a systematic sizing methodology is a strong tool enabling fast exploration of the design trade-offs. We also study how multi-mode converters can meet the power needs of IoT SoCs.