Design of a Rectenna for Ambient Energy Harvesting

Abstract

A rectenna is an antenna with associated RF system that rectifies the ambient RF energy to the dc output voltage. In this paper, a design of the RF system associated with the receiving antenna is presented which comprises of a voltage quadrupler circuit along with the proper matching network to get the maximum output dc voltage. The 4G band (2.3 to 2.4 GHz) is considered here for energy harvesting. The open circuit output voltage obtained is 2.37 volt for -10dBm input power and 4.217V DC for 0dBm input. With loaded output, the RF to Dc conversion efficiency is of 64.38% at 0dBm input power with the optimum load of 15.2 KΩ. The matching network is designed in distributed micro strip form. The entire design is optimized in Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS).