Design of a five-band dual-port rectenna for RF energy harvesting

Abstract

This paper proposed the design of a dual-port rectifier with multifrequency operations. The RF rectifier is achieved using a combination of L-section inductive impedance matching network (IMN) at Port-1 with a multiple stubs impedance transformer at Port-2. The fabricated prototype can harvest RF signal from GSM/900, GSM/1800, UMTS/2100, Wi-Fi/2.45 and LTE/2600 frequency bands at (0.94, 1.80, 2.10, 2.46, and 2.63 GHz), respectively. The rectifier occupies a small portion of a PCB board at 0.20 λg × 0.15 λg. The proposed circuit realized a measured peak RF-to-dc (radio frequency direct current) power conversion efficiency (PCE) of (21%, 22.76%, 25.33%, 21.57%, and 22.14%) for an input power of −20 dBm. The RF harvester attains a measured peak RF-to-dc PCE of 72.70% and an output dc voltage of 154 mV for an input power of 3 dBm at 2.46 GHz. Measurement of the proposed rectifier in the ambiance gives a peak dc output voltage of 376.1 mV from the five signal tones. Similarly, a low-powered bq25504-674 evaluation module (EVM) is integrated with the rectifier. The module boost and drive the rectifier output dc voltage to 945 mV. The performance of the proposed rectifier in the ambiance environment makes it a suitable module for low-powered RF applications.