A 5.8 GHz RF-DC Based Energy-Harvesting Front-End with a Load-Lighting LC-Oscillator Based Voltage Booster for a SWIPT IC

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to implement an Energy-Harvesting Front-End (EH-FE) based on a 5.8 GHz RF-DC converter and a light-loading LC-Oscillator (LCO) based Voltage Booster (VB) for a Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) Integrated Circuit (IC) application. An RF-DC converter operating at 5.8 GHz as the frequency of the SWIPT IC forms the proposed EH-FE. The RF-DC is in series with a high sensitive LCO-VB introducing the Load-Lighting Effect (LLE) on the RF-DC’s loading condition to perform a proper voltage boosting as the novel approach for RF-DC based self-power ICs operating at multi-GHz frequency bands. The load lighting effect of the VB improves the effective loading for the RF-DC from 10.7 Ω to 3.7 kΩ based on the presented analysis. The proposed EH-FE boosts the 5.8 RF-DC’s output voltage to 5V due to the LLE when the antenna sees a signal with 0 dBm power.