A WLAN 2.4-GHz RF energy harvesting system with reconfigurable rectifier for wireless sensor network

In RF energy harvesting for wireless sensor network, due to the variation of the available RF power for individual node sensor, the conventional Dickson rectifier could not achieve the optimal harvesting efficiency in a wide available power range. In this work, a novel reconfigurable rectifier with adjustable conversion ratio is proposed without changing matching network. Based on this, a WLAN (2.4 GHz) RF energy harvesting system is proposed with the maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The entire system is implemented in an 180nm CMOS process. Post-layout HSPICE simulation results show that with MPPT, the reconfigurable rectifier achieves a high energy harvesting efficiency for a wide available power range and is configured with 3.3x response time reduction when compared with the existing reconfigurable rectifier to cater for the frequent changing RF power.

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