A High Efficient RF-DC Converter for RF Energy Harvesting Applications

In this paper, a self-threshold voltage compensated RF-DC converter operating at 902 MHz is proposed for RF energy harvesting applications. A voltage divider chain consisting of auxiliary transistors is used to provide optimum compensation voltage to the gates of rectifying devices in the main rectification chain. The proposed RF-DC converter is designed and simulated in 180 nm CMOS technology. The simulation results show that the proposed circuit achieves peak power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 40% at -12 dBm input power across 1 MΩ load resistance. The proposed scheme achieves a sensitivity of -20 dBm for 1 MΩ and produces 1 V output voltage.