Hi,
Thought experiment:
I've been looking into DC DC converters that can start up from a low voltage. There's not that many of them and the lowest I've seen is able to start from 13mV (
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/20/5501/pdf ). Now that's impressive as hell, but I was thinking if it would be possible to achieve an even lower startup voltage using a MEMS solution to provide the initial kick.
Say you had a MEMS version of a conductive bimetalic strip that would act as a thermal cutoff switch - above a certain temperature it would disconnect, below it it would stay connected. This would be connected in series with a transformer (or inductor - boost topology type thingie). "Schematic" included. Once voltage is applied to the device, the switch starts to heat up - 1mV might not seem like a lot, but at microscopic scales it should be able to heat a very small volume by a LOT.
Once the MEMS switch disconnects, the transformer or an inductor will get a current change and a jolt of much higher voltage will appear on the secondary, allowing the DC DC converter to start.
Because this is a "mechanical" solution, it doesn't have to deal with low voltage semiconductor physics at all, so if you can create a MEMS thermal cutoff switch that disconnects itself when you apply 1mV to it, you can get a converter that starts at 1mV.
Now obviously there's a lot of drawbacks, but MEMS relays exist, as do all sorts of weird and wonderful structures. So...
Do you think it would work? It's just a thought experiment.