A Highly Efficient CMOS Rectifier for Ultra-Low-Power Ambient RF Energy Harvesting

This paper presents an innovative cross-coupled differential drive rectifier for ultra-low power RF energy harvesting applications. Designed in a standard 65-nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process, it employs dynamic threshold compensation and forward body biasing techniques to compensate for the threshold of MOS devices. A simple off-chip differential matching network is used to interface with the antenna. Post-layout simulations show that the proposed single-stage rectifier achieves a power conversion efficiency (PCE) > 10% and produces output voltage > 160 mV (at 300 k Omega load) when receiving a 2.4 GHz signal with average power of -30dBm. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the result shows favorable performance for low input powers (<-26 dBm) despite operating at higher frequency.