A Fully Electrical Startup Batteryless Boost Converter with 50mV Input Voltage for
Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting
Hao-Yen Tang, Po-Shuan Weng, Po-Chih Ku and Liang-Hung Lu
Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering,
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Abstract
A fully electrical startup boost converter is presented in this
paper. With a three-stage stepping-up architecture, the pro-
posed circuit is capable of performing thermoelectric energy
harvesting at an input voltage as low as 50 mV. Due to the
zero-current-switching (ZCS) operation of the boost converter
and automatic shutdown of the low-voltage starter and the aux-
iliary converter, conversion efficiency up to 73% is demon-
strated. The boost converter does not require bulky transfor-
mers or mechanical switches for kick-start, making it very at-
tractive for body area sensor network applications.
I. Introduction
Being one of the eco-friendly energy sources, thermoelectric
energy harvesting has attracted great attention for applications
such as powering sensor nodes for body area network. Howev-
er, limited by the device size and the temperature difference
between the human skin and the ambient air, the voltage gen-
erated by the thermoelectric generator (TEG) in practical ap-
plication scenarios could be as low as several tens of millivolts.
It is still a challenging task to realize a low-input-voltage boost
converter with high conversion efficiency. Recently, efforts
have been made to achieve this goal [1]-[5]. Conventional
energy-harvesting circuits use an external battery for assisting
startup and then the battery is detached after the converter is
fully operational. For batteryless operation, transformers with
large turn ratios [2] or mechanical switches [4] have been
adopted to assist the circuit startup at low input voltage. Alter-
natively, post-fabrication with threshold-trimming [5] was de-
veloped to avoid the use of bulky or exotic off-chip devices. In
this work, a novel stepping-up architecture is proposed to
achieve fully-electrical startup function without any external
auxiliaries for significant cost reduction.
II. Circuit Design
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the boost converter which
is composed of three converting stages and control circuitry.
To facilitate circuit startup at extremely low input voltage, all
building blocks are initially off except for the low-voltage
starter and the clock generator. The starter design is optimized
for low-input-voltage operation to charge CDDi at the cost of
conversion efficiency. As long as the internal supply voltage
VDDi is charged up to an intermediate voltage, the voltage
swing of the clock signal CKs becomes large enough to drive
the auxiliary converter. Once the auxiliary stage is operational,
CDDi is charged towards a higher voltage with enhanced charg-
ing current. After the internal supply VDDi exceeds 1 V, CKp_en
978-1-4673-0849-6/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE
turns high to provide the clock signal for the ZCS-controlled
boost converter. As the primary ZCS-controlled boost conver-
ter is activated, the capacitors for VDDi and VOUT are connected
together. In addition, the low-efficiency stages, namely the
low-voltage starter and the auxiliary step-up converter, are
automatically turned off.
Fig. 2 shows the circuit schematic of the individual stages.
The low-voltage starter is composed of an oscillator and a vol-
tage multiplier. The design of the starter takes advantage of
native NMOS devices, which are generally available in a stan-
dard CMOS process, for low-voltage startup. With native de-
vices for the cross-coupled pair, the LC-tank oscillator satisfies
Barkhausen criteria for sustained oscillation even at an ex-
tremely low input voltage. To convert the oscillation signal
into an elevated DC voltage for the internal supply, a voltage
multiplier is adopted. As shown in Fig. 2, a step-up converter
with a diode-connected MOSFET for the high-side switch is
used as the auxiliary converting stage. Considering the conver-
sion efficiency, the primary converter is realized by a boost
converter with ZCS-controlled scheme. To further maximize
the power transfer to the load, the equivalent input resistance
of the converter is self-adaptive by the frequency of the clock
generator such that it matches the source resistance (RTH),
leading to a regulated input voltage half of the open-circuit
voltage (VTH) of the TEG.
Limited by the stringent startup condition of the oscillator,
conventional power gating technique with a series switch is not
applicable for the shutdown of the starter. In this design, auto-
matic shutdown of the starter is achieved by the maximum
power transfer operation of the primary ZCS-controlled con-
verter. At the beginning of the startup, the low-voltage starter
drains only a small current from the TEG, leading to an input
voltage (VIN) close to VTH. After the converter entering the
steady-state operation, VIN is regulated to a value near half of
VTH for maximum power transfer. This effectively turns off the
oscillator and the starter. As a result, the boost converter can
operate at an extremely low input voltage while maintain high
conversion efficiency in a steady state.
III. Experimental Results
To characterize the electrical properties of the converter, a
power supply with controllable input voltage and a series re-
sistance of 6.2 is used to emulate the TEG. Fig. 3 shows the
startup transient waveforms with an open-circuit voltage of 50
mV and 100 mV, respectively, illustrating the three operation
phases in the startup procedure. The measured output power
and conversion efficiency versus the open-circuit input voltage
2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers 196
is shown in Fig. 4, indicating a maximum conversion efficien-
cy of 73%. Note that the converter starts up at an input voltage
as low as 50 mV while the lowest input voltage to sustain the
converter operation is 30 mV. To demonstrate the feasibility of
thermoelectric energy harvesting from a small temperature
difference, the boost converter is connected to a TEG with a
size of 2.62.6 cm2. With the lower TEG surface fixed at 25C,
the maximum power to the load for various temperature dif-
ferences are shown in Fig. 5. The performance summary along
with results from the state-of-the-art converters for thermoe-
lectric energy harvesting is presented in Table I. The converter
is implemented in a standard 65-nm CMOS process with a chip
area of 1.150.95 mm2. As shown in Fig. 6, the fabricated chip
was mounted on a PCB with wire bonding for performance
evaluation.
IV. Conclusion
A novel stepping-up architecture is proposed to achieve
fully electrical startup function of the boost converter. Using a
standard 65-nm CMOS process, the fabricated converter pro-
vides 1.2 V regulated output with an input voltage of 50 mV.
978-1-4673-0849-6/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE
Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the National Science
Council, Taiwan. The authors would like to thank Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Hsinchu, Taiwan for
chip fabrication and Industrial Technology Research Institute
of Taiwan for providing TEG samples.
References
[1] V.Leonov, T. Torfs, P. Fiorini, and C. Van Hoof, Thermoelectric con-
verters of human warmth for self-powered wireless sensor nodes,IEEE
J. Sensor, pp. 650-657, May. 2007.
[2] J. M. Damaschke, Design of a low-input-voltage converter for thermoe-
lectric generator, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., pp. 1203-1207, Sep. 1997.
[3] E. Carlson, K. Strunz and B. Otis, 20mV input boost converter for
thermoelectric energy harvesting, IEEE Symp. VLSI Circuits Dig. Tech.
Papers, pp. 162-163, Jun. 2009.
[4] Y. K. Ramadass and A. P. Chandrakasan, A batteryless thermoelectric
energy-harvesting interface circuit with 35mV startup voltage, ISSCC
Dig. Tech. Papers, pp. 486-487, Feb. 2010.
[5] P. Chen, et al., A 95mV-startup step-up converter with VTH-tuned oscil-
lator by fixed-charge programming and capacitor pass-on scheme,
ISSCC Dig. Tech. Papers, pp. 216-217, Feb. 2011.
2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers 197