A Dickson Hybrid Boost Converter With On-Chip Cold-Start for Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting.

This paper presents a Dickson hybrid boost converter with an on-chip cold starter for thermoelectric energy harvesting. The proposed harvester achieves both high power efficiency and low inductor volume. An on-chip LC oscillator cold starts the harvester without external components. Besides, a lookup table based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) improves the end-to-end efficiency in a wide input range. Designed and simulated in a 0.13 mu m CMOS process, the harvester achieves a maximum end-toend efficiency of 93.9% with a 5.6 mu H inductor. The circuit cold starts at an input of 70 mV and the minimum operation voltage is as low as 6 mV with a 100 nW load.