Low-Power Regulator for Micro Energy Harvesting Applications

Abstract

In micro energy harvesting applications one of the most essential blocks of the power management unit is the regulator. In this paper we present a low-power regulator consisting of a comparator, a voltage reference and an output voltage monitor. The output voltage of the regulation is set at 1.1V. The average current consumption of the regulator at 10kHz is 1.6nA. The energy/conversion ratio of the proposed comparator is 20fJ at $\mathrm{V}_{dd}\,=0.8\mathrm{V}$. The current consumption of the voltage reference and the output voltage monitor is 19pA and 22pA, respectively. These numbers make our solution very suitable for energy harvesters that have very limited energy levels available, as is the case of applications like implantable devices.