DEVELOPMENT OF CASCADED VOLTAGE DOUBLER RECTIFIER FOR RF ENERGY HARVESTING

Abstract

Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting is a process where RF energy from the ambient source is collected and converted into an electrical energy by using a rectifier circuit. However, the collected RF energy only supplies very low input power. Therefore, it is important to design a circuit that not only rectified the RF signal, but also with amplified characteristic to obtain a higher output voltage from a low input power. Driven by the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices operating in the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band, the presented rectifier circuit in this paper is designed in the same band as well. Initially, the voltage doubler circuit is chosen as the primary rectifier circuit, afterward cascaded into several stages until the most optimized result is obtained. The optimization is investigated across -30 dBm to 0 dBm of RF input power by varying the value of capacitor and resistor at a single stage. Based on the topology analysis, Dickson topology yields slightly higher voltage compared to Villard. In turn, the optimized number of stages is 6 because higher stages resulted to less output power. The measured reflection coefficient of the fabricated prototype is better than 40 dB at the center frequency with 240 MHz bandwidth. The rectified voltage is 3.4 V with 0 dBm input power. When it is supplied by 5 dBm input power, the green LED that connected to rectifier circuit output is light-up, confirming the RF energy harvesting application.