Research of the DC-DC converters based on a charge pump for power sources from environment

Self-contained electronic units gain more wide circulation. Because of a limited stock of capacity of batteries, there is a need of devices, harvesting energy from environmental sources. The main actual problem is the instability of the output voltage of this type of sources. In presented paper, four types of the DC-DC converters based on charge pump were investigated. Results show that the most prominent are converters utilizing "exponential" and "favrat" architectures, where the output voltage in the range of 1.2–1.5 V and output power up to 60 μW can be achieved while the input voltage is not less than 200 mV.