2398 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 51, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2016
Fully-Integrated High-Conversion-Ratio
Dual-Output Voltage Boost Converter
With MPPT for Low-Voltage
Energy Harvesting
Toshihiro Ozaki, Student Member, IEEE, Tetsuya Hirose, Senior Member, IEEE,
Hiroki Asano, Student Member, IEEE, Nobutaka Kuroki, Member, IEEE, and Masahiro Numa, Member, IEEE
Abstract— This paper proposes a fully-integrated high-
conversion-ratio dual-output voltage boost converter (VBC) with
maximum power point tracking (MPPT) circuits for low-voltage
energy harvesting. The VBC consists of two voltage generators
that generate V
OUT1
and V
OUT2
. V
OUT1
and V
OUT2
are three
and nine times higher than the harvester’s output V
IN
, respec-
tively. V
OUT1
is used as a supply voltage for on-chip application
circuits while V
OUT2
is used as the charging voltage for a Li-ion
secondary battery. The VBC achieves a high voltage conversion
ratio (max. × 9) and a high power conversion efficiency. The
MPPT circuits control the operating frequencies of the CPs to
extract maximum power at each output. The measurement results
demonstrated that the circuit converted a 0.59 V input to a 1.41 V
output with 75.8% efficiency when the output powers of V
OUT1
and V
OUT2
were 396 and 0 μW, respectively, and a 0.62 V input
to a 4.54 V output with 49.1% efficiency when the output powers
were 0 and 114 μW, respectively.
Index Terms—Charge pump, DC-DC converter, energy har-
vesting, power management circuit, switched capacitor, voltage
boost converter.
I. I NTRODUCTION
E
NERGY harvesting has attracted much attention as an
alternative energy source for next generation power-aware
small-sized LSI applications [1], [2]. For such applications,
energy storage devices are an indispensable element to store
harvested energy because the output power of a small harvester
is basically weak and easily lost, depending on the power
generation environment. A thin film Li-ion secondary battery
is a good candidate for such applications [3], [4]. However,
the output voltages of the harvesters are too low to charge the
battery (e.g., the output voltage of a single photovoltaic (PV)
cell around the maximum power point is 0.5–0.6 V while
the voltage required for charging is higher than 4.0 V).
Therefore, a power management circuit with a voltage boost
converter (VBC) is strongly required. Fig. 1 shows the concept
Manuscript received February 12, 2016; revised April 20, 2016; accepted
June 6, 2016. Date of publication August 1, 2016; date of current version
September 30, 2016. This paper was approved by Guest Editor Makoto
Ikeda. This work was partially supported by VLSI Design and Education
Center (VDEC), the University of Tokyo in collaboration with Cadence Design
Systems, Inc. and Mentor Graphics, Inc., KAKENHI, and the New Energy
and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Elec-
tronic Engineering, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan (e-mail:
tosihiro@cas.eedept.kobe-u.ac.jp; hirose@eedept.kobe-u.ac.jp).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSSC.2016.2582857
Fig. 1. Power management system.
of our power management circuit with a VBC using a PV cell
and a Li-ion secondary battery. The VBC generates two
boosted voltages of V
OUT1
and V
OUT2
from the output voltage
of the PV cell (V
IN
). V
OUT1
is used as a supply voltage for
internal application circuits, and V
OUT2
is used as a charging
voltage for the Li-ion battery.
VBCs for low-voltage and low-power energy harvesting
have been proposed [5]–[8]. Although they can convert a
low-voltage harvester’s output to a higher output voltage with
high power conversion efficiency (PCE), the output voltages
of these converters are less than 3.3 V and are still low
to charge Li-ion batteries. Li-ion battery chargers have been
reported [9], [10]. However, the minimum input voltages
are higher than 3 V, so they cannot receive the low-voltage
harvester’s output voltage. A VBC for low-voltage-input and
high-voltage-output energy harvesting has been proposed [11].
However, the maximum load current is less than several μA
and it is difficult to provide medium voltage for on-chip appli-
cation circuits. Thus, fully-integrated VBCs that can convert
low-voltage harvester’s output to both a medium voltage for
application circuits and a high voltage for a battery charger
have not been investigated enough.
In this paper, we present a fully-integrated high-
conversion-ratio dual-output VBC with maximum power point
tracking (MPPT) circuits for low-voltage energy harvest-
ing [12]. The proposed VBC is based on our previous VBC
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