A Compact High-Efficiency Broadband Rectifier With a Wide Dynamic Range of Input Power for Energy Harvesting

• Published in: IEEE microwave and wireless components letters Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 433 - 436
• Main Authors: He, Zhongqi, Liu, Changjun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2020
• Subjects: Broadband; energy harvesting (EH); high efficiency; rectifier; wide input power range
• ISSN: 1531-1309; 1558-1764
• DOI: 10.1109/LMWC.2020.2979711

In this letter, a compact high-efficiency broadband microwave rectifier with an extended range of input power is proposed for energy harvesting. In the proposed structure, a novel broadband impedance-matching network is employed to reach high radio frequency (RF) to dc conversion efficiency. The reduction in mismatching loss over a wide bandwidth and input power range is achieved by impedance transformation from three segments of microstrip lines, which leads to a compact design to realize broadband impedance matching. A theoretical analysis and simulations of the proposed rectifier are presented. For validation, a broadband rectifier operating between 2.1 and 3.3 GHz is implemented and tested. The proposed rectifier shows a bandwidth of 44.4% for efficiency over 70% at an input power of 14 dBm. The measured efficiency remains above 50% from 2 to 3.3 GHz with an input power from 4 to 16 dBm. Moreover, the proposed rectifier has a compact size of 31 mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\times18 </tex-math></inline-formula> mm.