RF Energy Harvesting System with RFID-Enabled Charge Storage Monitoring

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) energy scavenging is a compelling approach to energize the low-power wireless devices. We present an energy harvesting system consists of a low-power RF switch circuitry and a passive UHF RFID tag. When the voltage at the storage capacitor terminals exceeds 0.58 V, RF switch connects the UHF RFID microchip to a dipole-type tag antenna. This way, an RFID reader can detect the charge storage level wirelessly with minimal power consumption at the harvester. In this paper, we detail the development of the system and present results from both simulations and measurement. Overall, we were able to achieve 0.58 V at the storage capacitor and detect the storage level indicator tag at the distance of 5.1 m in an experiment where regular 8.7 dBi patch antennas were connected to the harvester input and output of an RFID reader emitting 2.5 W EIRP.