ACPT A CMOS Startup Circuit for Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting Systems

Abstract

This work presents the design of a fully integrated startup circuit for energy harvesting. The startup circuit can provide an output voltage of 520mV and drives 10uW output power for the minimal input capabilities on a thermoelectric generator. The proposed startup generator reaches a peak efficiency of 72% with an input voltage of 140mV @ 53KHz on switching frequency with only 6.87nW of power consumption. The ultra-low power performance is possible due to an asymmetric design of a ring oscillator and a simple two non-overlapping phase circuit implemented on a CMOS 180nm technology.