Low-Power Highly Efficient Voltage-Boosting Rectifier for Wide-band Inductively-Coupled Power Telemetry

Abstract

Wireless power transfer has been studied significantly in the past couple of years for implanted biomedical devices. Due to the extreme power constraints, implantable devices need efficient AC-DC power rectification. This paper presents a low-power rectifier for a wideband wireless power transfer system. The 10-stage rectifier is designed using a standard 130 nm BiCMOS process. The proposed design can rectify voltages as low as 100 mV, which is a low voltage that traditional rectifiers are not able to rectify. The rectifier has a wider frequency operation range of 10 kHz – 100 MHz compared to the previous works where the maximum operating frequency is up to 40–50 MHz. The designed rectifier is able to achieve a power conversion efficiency of 51% with 100 mV 7.25 MHz input signal, which make it highly applicable for the wireless power transfer applications for implantable sensors.