Millimeter Wave Agile Transmitter for IoT Operations

Abstract

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology has been gathering a large interest in the last decade due to its increasing efficiency. Starting from low-frequency systems via magnetic coupling, the trend has been evolving toward high-frequency solutions, with a particular attention to the emerging 5G wireless communication equipment for the internet of things (IoT). In this respect, WPT has to face new challenges to become competitive at frequencies that will be of utmost importance in the near future, like the 28 GHz band. In this paper, we offer a rigorous combined electromagnetic/nonlinear circuit approach to evaluate the performance of a novel WPT system combining state-of-the-art time-modulated array (TMA) technology and high-performance metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diodes with fast switching time. Merging the advantages of TMAs with MIMs gives rise to a new family of low-power WPT devices, able to efficiently supply energy to the electronics used in IoT networks.