A High-Sensitivity Wide Input-Power-Range Ultra-Low-Power RF Energy Harvester for IoT Applications

Abstract

Radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) is very attractive for the Internet of things (IoT) and self-powered micro-systems such as wearable biomedical devices and wireless sensor networks. This paper proposes, analyzes, and implements a new RF-DC converter in standard 130 nm CMOS technology. The developed converter is designed and optimized for ultra-low-power IoT and wearable biomedical applications using the 900 MHz ISM band. The proposed 10-stage cross-connected rectifier compensates the transistors threshold voltage by using both dynamic and static bias compensation techniques. An analytical model of the rectifier based on the MOSFET transistor equations is presented, allowing optimization of the rectifier as a function of the number of stages and transistors sizing, improving the sensitivity and the input power range of the converter. The measurement results demonstrate a sensitivity of &#x2212;25.5 dBm for 1 V output across a 5-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{M}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> resistive load and &#x2212;29 dBm for a 100 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{M}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> load, which is better than the best previously reported results. The measured peak end-to-end efficiency of the proposed harvester is 42.4&#x0025; at &#x2212;16 dBm input power, delivering 2.19 V to a 450 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{k}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> load.