A 0.1-0.6 V Input Range Voltage Boost Converter with Low-Leakage Driver for Low-Voltage Energy Harvesting

This paper proposes a fully integrated voltage boost converter (VBC) for low-voltage energy harvesting. The proposed VBC consists of three stage charge pumps (CPs) with a low-leakage driver, ring oscillator, and 4-phase clock generator. The output voltage is four times higher than an input voltage VIN. The low-leakage driver generates control signals to operate CPs with low leakage current. The amplitude of the control signals is 2VIN and does not depend on the load current. The proposed VBC achieves a wide load current, high output voltage, and high efficiency, even with a low-voltage input of the harvester. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed VBC converted 0.1-V input to 0.362-V output and 0.6-V input to 2.38-V output, when the load current is zero. The peak efficiency was 70.3% at a 0.6-V input and 1-mA load current.