Design and Analysis of Wideband Rectifier for Harvesting Low Power RF Signal from Wireless Communication Networks
摘要
This paper introduces a rectifier design for smooth integration with wideband antennas having an impedance of approximately 50 ohms at the desired frequencies. The rectifier is designed using a voltage doubler topology and efficiently doubles the input voltage at different frequencies, achieving a maximum output voltage of 3.69 V at 0 dBm input power. The frequencies considered are 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, and 2.45 GHz and the design is optimized using stubs and microstrip lines. The simulation results validate its robust performance in RF energy harvesting applications. The study considers the impact of load impedance and input power variations on output DC voltage, suggesting strategies like resistance compression network (RCN) and impedance compression network (ICN) to improve the power conversion efficiency. The rectifier constantly maintains voltage doubling functionality across a wide range of input power (−10 dBm to 5 dBm). Notably, at lower power levels (e.g., −5 dBm), the design validates exactly double output DC voltage, for 1.3 V input voltage, the attained output voltage from the rectifier is 2.6 V under no load condition.