As the month of February fades away into March, a Google Alert (see note) brought me an actual Joule Thief, sort of. It looks to me more like a switch mode power supply, with its opto coupler. That, to me, seemed puzzling since the primary and secondary share the same common ground.
I haven’t done any perusing of data sheets to find out if this circuit will work from 2.2 V down to 0.6 volt, as shown. What concerns me is that in order to get that low a supply voltage, it requires special and difficult to obtain components, especially the FETs.
The design was sent in to EDN by a reader. That’s one reason to verify its legitimacy.
Note: lately the Google Alerts have seldom brought me anything worthwhile, and on a number of occasions have directed me to sites that drop very nasty adware on to my PC which is difficult to remove. For these reasons I’ve been tempted to remove the alerts. But once in awhile it renews my enthusiasm by coming up with something worthwhile.