A dual-band rectifier for RF energy harvesting systems

Abstract

The environment of the city is surrounded by a lot of radio frequency (RF) energy that is broadcasted by diverse wireless systems. In order to enhance the value of the energy more than the channels to communicate, the ambient RF energy harvesting system was designed to harvest and recycle the energy for many applications such as battery chargers, sensor devices and portable devices. The main element of the ambient RF energy harvesting system is a rectenna that is the combination of an antenna and a rectifying circuit. Even though the ambient RF energy is widely broadcasted with many systems, the energy is extremely low. Therefore, the high performance of the antenna and the rectifying circuit has to be designed for supporting the small incident power; also the number of frequency channels of the rectenna can enhance the performance and support different harvesting locations. This paper proposes a dual-band rectifier for RF energy harvesting systems that was designed to operate at 2.1 GHz and 2.45 GHz. The first channel can provide the maximum efficiency of 24% with 1.9 V of the output voltage at 10 dBm of input power. On the other hand, a maximum efficiency of 18% and 1.7 V of the output voltage can be achieved by the second channel at 10 dBm of input power.