A 0.2V trifilar-coil DCO with DC-DC converter in 16nm FinFET CMOS with 188dB FOM, 1.3kHz resolution, and frequency pushing of 38MHz/V for energy harvesting applications

Abstract

Energy harvesting (EH) is a topic of intensive research promising battery-free operation of massive networks of wireless IoT devices. To simultaneously satisfy the EH and IoT, ultra-low-power (ULP) consumption with ultra-low-voltage (ULV) supply are required. Some, e.g., photovoltaic, EH output voltage (<0.3V) is below the threshold voltage (V_t) of even the most recent FinFET CMOS transistors, which makes it extremely challenging for circuit designers. Thus, new special circuit techniques are needed to make the IoT devices work properly with supplies below V_t.