Miniaturized Polarization-Insensitive Rectifying Metasurface for Powering Internet of Things Devices

Abstract

In this paper, a miniaturized polarization-insensitive rectifying metasurface unit cell is proposed for powering electric devices of Internet-of-Things (IoT). The metasurface, an array of periodic unit cells, consists of two layers of substrate and three layers of metal. The metasurface unit cell is composed of eight asymmetric dipoles, which are arranged orthogonally and closely on both surfaces of the upper substrate. The strong coupling between dipoles induces extra reactive components, which makes the unit size be miniaturized to only 0.15 λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> . The miniaturization mechanism is analyzed by the equivalent circuit theory. The simulation results show that the harvesting efficiency for arbitrary polarized waves are higher than 90% from 2.2 to 2.7 GHz (20%). Being integrated with Schottky diodes at the proper position, the rectifying metasurface is designed. A 2 × 2 array with the size of 0.3 λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 0.3 λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> was fabricated and measured. The maximum harvesting-rectifying efficiency is 61% at 2.45 GHz under different polarization angles. When the power density is 8 mW/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , 80 mW direct current (DC) power could be obtained.