Abstract
In this article, a fully-integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converter based on a Dickson charge pump able to work with input voltage levels that force the transistors working in subthreshold region is presented. The proposed topology exploits resistors in the charge transfer switch in order to overcome the limits of conventional solutions when working in the subthreshold regime. Post-layout simulations using a 28-nm FD-SOI technology show that the CP can boost an input voltage as low as 50 mV to a maximum output voltage of 270 mV, keeping a settling time about 25X lower than the conventional dual-branch cross-coupled charge pump and a voltage conversion efficiency higher than 76%. The proposed topology is particularly suited for the start-up of power management units supplied by thermoelectric generators.
Highlights
Energy Harvesting (EH) from available ambient energy sources is arousing great interest in the engineering world
With the specific role to energetically sustain circuit operations in autonomous electronic systems, EH is continuously exploited in a wide range of applications such as wearable devices, implantable medical devices, and wireless sensor nodes for Internet of Things (IoT) and Body Area Networks (BANs) [1]–[10]
SIMULATION RESULTS AND COMPARISON To verify the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid crosscoupled Charge pump (CP) and validate the actual advantage in term of low start-up voltage under sufficient output power transmission, a CP with 2 building blocks has been designed and simulated by using a 28-nm Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) technology provided by STMicroelectronics
Summary
Energy Harvesting (EH) from available ambient energy sources is arousing great interest in the engineering world. CPs have been commonly adopted in nonvolatile memories, RF antenna switch controllers and LCD drivers, where key design constraints are settling time, current drivability and silicon area [29], [35]–[42] Their field of application has been extended to energy-autonomous systems such as battery-less circuits, biomedical implants, IoT and BAN nodes. Similar strategy is applied in [53], where a phase generator is used to provide the boosted gate signals of the MOSFETs and to adapt their turn on sequence to facilitate the startup of the whole system (adaptive scheme) Having this in mind and focusing on TEG-based applications, this work proposes a novel CP architecture to achieve startup function without any off-chip component for significant area and cost reduction.
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