A Broadband High-Efficiency RF Rectifier for Ambient RF Energy Harvesting

Abstract

In this letter, a compact broadband high-efficiency RF rectifier is presented for ambient RF energy harvesting (EH). A novel impedance matching network with an additional quarter-wavelength short-circuited stub was designed to achieve broadband impedance matching. After the branch was added, the parallel resonance point on track $S_{11}$ did not move, and the remaining points were compressed. The measurement results show that the proposed topology could realize a broadband high-efficiency rectifier for ambient RF EH, and the measured results were basically consistent with the simulation results. The measured efficiency is as high as 71.5% for an input power level of 8 dBm. A 1–2.4 GHz wide frequency band with an efficiency above 50% is achieved for an input power level of 5 dBm with a terminal load of 1.6 $\text{k}\Omega $ . Moreover, the circuit had wide dynamic input power characteristics, whose measured values remained above 50% with an input power of 3–14 dBm.