Range Scaling of Wirelessly Powered Sensor Systems

Technology scaling is improving the energy efficiency of computation, in addition to increasing the density of transistors in integrated circuits. We argue that energy efficiency scaling, when combined with RF path loss, implies that the range at which a particular fixed computational workload can be wirelessly powered is increasing exponentially, but with a “shallow” scaling exponent that is one half of the underlying energy efficiency scaling exponent. If the trend continues, we can expect dramatic increases in the range at which workloads such as sensor nodes and computational RFID tags can be wirelessly powered. This would enable many new use cases and application scenarios for wirelessly powered sensing and computing devices.