DC-DC Converter for Powering Micro-system Load in Energy Harvesting Front-ends

Energy harvesting is a process of scavenging energy from the ambient source and storing for powering an autonomous system. Energy harvesting transducer with limited area provides a very little power in the order of few hundreds of μW. So, the energy harvesting front-end needs to be designed with a very limited power budget in order to get a net power gain for supplying power to the micro-system loads. Usually, a DC-DC converter is used in the energy harvesting front-end. In this paper, an ultra-low powered DC-DC converter is proposed to transfer the limited harvested energy to the micro-system load. The proposed converter works on the principle of burst mode control. The power efficiency of the proposed converter is optimized in the architectural level as well as circuit level. The proposed converter is designed in 180 nm CMOS technology and the simulation result shows an above 85% power efficiency over 99.5% of the load range (10 μA to 5 mA) and it is quite attractive for using in the energy harvesting system.