Prospects of Tunnel FETs in the Design of Power Management Circuits for Weak Energy Harvesting DC Sources

Autor: David Nunes Cavalheiro, Francesc Moll, Stanimir Valtchev
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society, Vol 6, Pp 382-391 (2018)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2168-6734
DOI: 10.1109/JEDS.2018.2808950
Popis: In this paper, a new tunnel FET (TFET)-based power management circuit (PMC) is proposed for weak dc energy harvesting sources. Thanks to their particular carrier injection mechanisms, TFETs can be used to design efficient energy harvesting circuits by enabling the power extraction from sources which are not only at very low voltage levels (sub-0.1 V) but also at very low power levels (a few nW). As TFET devices are designed as reverse-biased diodes, changes in conventional circuit topologies are required in order to take full advantage of these emerging devices. The circuit design techniques proposed in this paper represent an improvement in output voltage and input power range with respect to previously published TFET-based PMCs. Simulation results show that the TFET-based PMC can sustain itself from a 2.5 nW@50 mV dc source, powering a load at 0.5 V with 29% of efficiency.
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