Fully Integrated, 100-mV Minimum Input Voltage Converter With Gate-Boosted Charge Pump Kick-Started by <i>LC</i> Oscillator for Energy Harvesting

Abstract

A fully integrated step-up dc-dc converter for energy harvesting applications is presented. A minimum start-up voltage of 100 mV is achieved by the start-up mechanism based on an LC oscillator (LCO). Conventional voltage converters with the LCO-based start-up mechanism provide a significantly low conversion efficiency of around 1%. To overcome this drawback, the following two circuit techniques are proposed in this brief: 1) a gate-boosted charge pump; and 2) an LCO deactivation. The proposed voltage converter is fabricated in the 65-nm silicon-on-thin-buried-oxide process. The measurement results show that when the input voltage is 100 mV, the proposed converter can provide an output of 760 mV at a conversion efficiency of 33%, which is the highest efficiency compared with the conventional fully integrated voltage converters.