A high-efficiency radio frequency rectifier-booster regulator for ambient WLAN energy harvesting applications

Abstract

In this paper, a novel high-efficiency rectifier-booster regulator operating in radio frequency (RF) is firstly proposed. Then an entire WLAN energy harvesting system is demonstrated. A flower-shaped broadband dual-polarized cross dipole rectenna with matching network is employed to harvest electromagnetic energy from a WiFi router. A novel rectifier-booster regulator (RBR) is proposed to rectify the AC energy to DC and boost the high output voltage. It evolves from a Grein-acher rectifier and two Dickson charge pump to form a full wave rectifier. The measurement results show that the RBR can achieve up to ×3.4 voltage boosting with 85% voltage conversion efficiency (VCE) and provide over 1 V output voltage within a distance of 50 cm between a power amplifier (PA) with 20 dBm transmitting power and the rectenna. Maximum energy of 245 μW is harvested by the entire system. The good performance shows its wide practicality for Internet-of-Thing (IoT) applications.