The dickson charge pump as voltage booster for light energy harvesting on CMOS vision chips

The photodiode structures on a vision chip can be configured in either imaging (IM) or energy harvesting (EHM) mode. The upper voltage achieved with on-chip energy harvesting is below 0.5 V on standard CMOS technologies, thus DC/DC converters are needed to reach the power supply of today CMOS technologies. This paper addresses the design of a Dickson charge pump to this purpose on a standard 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The paper provides data on how the photoconversion characteristics of the photodiodes change, as well as on how the performance metrics of a CMOS vision chip are affected when the energy harvested in EHM is used as power supply in IM.