A Battery-Less Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting Interface Circuit With 35 mV Startup Voltage

Abstract

A battery-less thermoelectric energy harvesting interface circuit to extract electrical energy from human body heat is implemented in a 0.35 m CMOS process. A mechanically assisted startup circuit enables operation of the system from input voltages as low as 35 mV. An efficient control circuit that performs maximal transfer of the extracted energy to a storage capacitor and regulates the output voltage at 1.8 V is presented.Index Terms-Energy harvesting, low voltage startup, maximum power point tracking, micro-power DC-DC converters, thermoelectric energy harvesters.

A 120mV startup circuit based on charge pump for energy harvesting circuits

“…The comparison of the startup circuits for energy harvesters is shown in Table I. In [1] and [2], the circuit relies on an external components or a voltage storage source to kick start the circuit operation. In [3], the boosted voltage is 0.7 V with a two stage approach.…”

“…Commonly used startup circuits have been reported in [1,2,3]. The boost converter circuit proposed in [1] needs a bulky transformer and an additional voltage storage device for jump starting the circuit.…”

“…The boost converter circuit proposed in [1] needs a bulky transformer and an additional voltage storage device for jump starting the circuit. In [2] an additional mechanical vibration switch is used to start the device. In [3], the authors propose a charge pump circuit using forward biasing.…”

A 900-2400 MHz AC-DC Rectifier Circuit for Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting

“…The idea is to make the devices to harvest the available surrounding power and transfer to the electrical power which can be stored in the battery. There are a lot of power energy sources lies around us such as radio frequency (RF), vibration, solar, wind and thermal [1][2][3][4][5]. Up to date, the present energy harvesting only generates small electrical power, which depends on technique and concept used in the system.…”

An off-chip input capacitor-less boost converter with fast MPPT for energy harvesting

“…The maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is a critical ingredient in a boost converter for energy harvesting applications since the ambient energy from solar, thermoelectric or piezoelectric harvester is non-consistent [1]. Among various MPPT algorithms, the fractional open-circuit voltage method is widely employed to avoid power-hungry digital signal processers [2].…”