Comparing Voltage Boosting Circuits

Overview & disclaimers This post compares the power efficiency of some voltage boosting circuits. The circuits discussed here are: What we’re doing here is neither complete nor scientific and aspires to more than it delivers. Comparison base line The generic version of all voltage-boosting circuits in this comparisson is this: Generic voltage booster circuit We’ll require that all circuits lift a 5V DC input voltage to a stable 10V output voltage measured on a 1ΚΩ resistor load. Power efficiency is the power consumed on the resistor load divided by the power delivered by the input voltage source. All numbers were chosen semi-arbitrarily. 5V is a widely used voltage in low-power electronics, so it’s widely available and low enough to justify needs to raise a voltage for further use. We could have chosen eg. 3V or 1,5V, but some circuits don’t operate on such low input voltages, which would have reduced the selection to a uselessly small sample. The resistor load is important, be ... Read full article.