A low-voltage high-efficiency voltage doubler for thermoelectric energy harvesting

This paper presents a low-voltage high-efficiency voltage doubler for thermoelectric energy harvesting. A negative charge pump is used to reduce on-resistance of PMOSFET load switches. Additional circuitry for achieving high efficiency just requires small chip-area and low-cost. The voltage doubler is implemented in 0.13-μm 1.2V CMOS process. The proposed doubler improves the low-voltage power efficiency by 17%, compared to conventional voltage doublers. Moreover, the proposed doubler can support wider load range. The maximum power efficiency reaches 52% at the input voltage of 0.2V.