Auto-calibrating threshold compensation technique for RF energy harvesters

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a new threshold compensation technique for UHF Dickson rectifiers. The proposed solution addresses the efficiency reduction of previous architectures especially under large input powers. The measurements show that the proposed technique achieves very good efficiency within 10 dBm variation of the input power. Therefore, the technique is suitable for applications where the incident power is not constant. Thanks to the reduction in the reverse leakage current, a peak efficiency of 34% at 433 MHz was measured.