Gate Voltage Optimization in Capacitive DC-DC Converters for Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This paper presents a gate voltage optimized fully integrated charge pump for thermoelectric energy harvesting applications. In this paper, the trade-off generated by rising the gate voltage of switching transistors are discussed. The proposed 5/3-stage design, which implemented with 180 nm CMOS technique, achieved a down to 0.12V/0.13V startup voltage correspondingly with the proposed technique. A 20% peak power conversion efficiency improvement is achieved when comparing with a similar 3-stage linear charge pump in previous state-of-the-art research.