A comparative study of integrated RF to DC power conversion system for RF energy harvesting

Battery power has been a popular choice of delivering DC power to many portable RF systems including wireless sensor nodes/internet of Everything (IoE). An autonomously powered RF system of the orders of 100’s of µwatts is becoming increasingly popular in recent times because of integrated solutions in energy harvesting. The minimum sensitivity of an RF energy harvester and the targeted deliverable output voltage for a specific load resistance are dictated by threshold voltage of transistors used and reverse leakage of such transistors. A detailed look into the architectures of rectifiers can help tackle design problems in the RF-DC conversion process. So in this work we focused on the design of integrated RF energy harvesting by studying four important architectures of RF-DC converters. To achieve a fair comparison between these architectures, a matching network operating at 0.8 MHz is designed and applied for simulation. All of these converters are tested in LT-SPICE XVII using the same designed matching network and the rectifiers are implemented in 180 nm CMOS technology. © 2021