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Project Notes

#611 Half-Wave Dickson Charge Pump

Zener-regulated 12V Dickson Charge Pump driven with Arduino PWM using a single pin.

Build

Notes

The Dickson Charge Pump is a very neat trick for multiplying an input voltage.

It is basically a capacitor bucket-brigade, with diodes for flow control, and a switching signal to make it go.

It is not the most efficient voltage booster, and cannot drive very high currents, but may be a convenient solution depending on the application.

I’ve already covered this in LEAP#393 Dickson Charge Pump. In that case it used two PWM signals to drive each stage of the charge pump with alternative voltage.

This project demonstrates a modified version that uses only one signal to drive every other stage of the charge pump ladded, with intermediate stages coupled to ground.

NB: this was suggested by @steveschnepp on Issue#25. It is also covered in the wikipedia article.

Switching Signal

I’m using Timer2 Fast PWM to generate a square-wave on Arduino pin 11 (OCR2A) at 62kHz - OC2A to clear on Compare Match and OC2B disconnected. The duty cycle is set at 50%.

Here’s a scope trace of the waveform.

pwm_pump_control

Since we’re using the chip’s native PWM capabilities, it is not possible to change the pin that the PWM signals appear on.

Note: it is possible to use other pins by using one of the other timers. This sketch uses Timer2 as it is generally available and is not used by other standard libraries.

See LEAP#254 AvrHardwarePWM for more details on hardware PWM.

Zener Regulation

Without the zener diode in place, this 4-stage charge pump delivers about 14.5V at the output tap.

The 1N4742 has a nominal zener voltage of 12V. An (optional) 2.2kΩ resistor is in series to soak up some of the voltage drop.

I’ve included a 10kΩ resistor to simulate a load on the 12V supply.

Performance

Works great:

  • very little ripple, < 20mV
  • charge pump and load drawing under 2mA
  • Arduino, which is also powering the charge pump, is drawing around 20mA total

Code

The HalfWave.ino sketch is about as simple as it gets:

  • sets up PWM
  • in the main loop, demonstrates how to turn on and off the PWM outputs by changing the pin mode (5 seconds on, 5 seconds off)

Construction

bb

schematic

bb_build

Credits and References

About LEAP#611 ArduinoPower
Project Source on GitHub Project Gallery Return to the LEAP Catalog

This page is a web-friendly rendering of my project notes shared in the LEAP GitHub repository.

LEAP is just my personal collection of projects, usually involving an Arduino or other microprocessor in one way or another. Some are full-blown projects, while many are trivial breadboard experiments, intended to learn and explore something interesting (IMHO!).

The projects are usually inspired by things found wild on the net, or ideas from the sources such as:

Feel free to borrow liberally, and if you spot any issues do let me know. See the individual projects for credits where due. There are even now a few projects contributed by others - send your own over in a pull request if you would also like to add to this collection.