A photovoltaic (PV) energy harvester is proposed, and it adopts the fractional open-circuit voltage method to track the maximal power point of PV cells. The proposed harvester was designed and fabricated by using a 0.18-μm 1P6M mixed-signal process. The input voltage of the proposed harvester may range from 0.5 to 1.1 V, and its measured peak total efficiency is 93.4%. The proposed harvester is suitable for Internet-of-Things applications, and the maximal duty cycle it can afford for a device with a 5-mA load and 20-ms activation time is 50%.
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Hsu et al. (2018) studied this question.