A Compact Dual-Port Multi-Band Rectifier Circuit for RF Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This paper presents a compact multi-band rectifier with an improved impedance matching bandwidth. It uses a combination of п–matching network (MN) at Port-1, with a parallel connection of three cell branch MN at Port-2. The proposed impedance matching network (IMN) is adopted to reduce circuit complexity, to improve circuit performance, and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the rectifier at low input power. The fabricated rectifier prototype operates at 0.92, 1.82, 2.1, 2.46 and 2.65 GHz covering GSM/900, GSM/1800, UMTS2100, and Wi-Fi/2.45–LTE2600. The size of the compact rectifier on the PCB board is 0.13λg × 0.1λg. The fabricated rectifier achieved an RF-to DC (radio frequency direct current) PCE of 31.8%, 24%, 22.7%, and 15%, and 14.1% for −20 dBm at the five respective measured operating frequencies. The circuit attains a peak RF-to-DC PCE of 82.3% for an input power of 3 dBm at 0.92 GHz. The proposed rectifier realizes an ambient output dc voltage of 454 mV for multi-tone input signals from the two ports. The rectifier drives a bq25504-674 power management module (PMM) to achieve 1.21 V from the two-port connection. The rectifier has the ability to exploit both frequency domain through the multi-band operation with good impedance bandwidth and a spatial domain using dual-port configuration. Hence, it is a potential candidate for various applications in radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) system.