High-bandwidth floating gate CMOS rectifiers with reduced voltage drop

This paper presents improved integrated CMOS rectifiers using floating gate (FG) transistors. These FG rectifiers have a larger output voltage compared to standard realizations and work also at high input frequencies, which is essential for telemetric applications in the MHz range. Single-poly FGs are used, which can be produced in standard CMOS processes without special process options. The simulated performance is shown with 3.3, 5 and 20 V transistors at a frequency of 13.56 MHz. Using 20 V transistors, a voltage robust rectifier with e.g. 3.4 V output voltage from a 4 V input amplitude is realized. This is about 70% more output voltage compared to the same rectifier without FGs (Vout = 2 V). Programming of the FGs must be done only once.