Enhancing Dynamic Range of RF-to-DC Rectifier using Leakage Current Reduction Technique

In this paper, the dynamic range of the conventional differential drive rectifier is enhanced based on leakage current reduction technique, to solve the narrow dynamic range problem of the input power and improve the output rectifier performance. The proposed design uses auxiliary transistors to control the conductivity of the rectifying PMOS devices dynamically to reduce the reverse leakage current. Post layout simulations have been performed using 0.18 μm CMOS technology at 402 MHz with 10kΩ load resistor. The proposed rectifier increases the range of the RF input power about ten times compared to a conventional rectifier's dynamic range and reduces the reverse leakage current from ‒98 μA to ‒22 μA. It also boosts the output average voltage at high input power. In addition, the developed rectifier exhibits good performance over wide band of input frequencies up to 2.4 GHz. The proposed rectifier has a small area of about 0.19 mm2.