High Sensitivity RF Energy Harvesting System with Self-Calibrate Network

An effective codesign methodology of high sensitivity RF energy harvesting (RFEH) system for passive IoT applications is proposed, and chip implementation based on this solution was fabricated in standard TSMC 180 nm CMOS technology. By this systematic approach, a RFEH system including antenna, rectifier, power management unit (PMU) and impedance self-calibrate network were adopted to achieve an excellent sensitivity performance, which is characterized not only by high-Q factor but also large bandwidth. This work achieved high sensitivity performance of -32 dBm in 920~925 MHz for 0.7 V output voltage in anechoic chamber environment. Moreover, it can be powered by 36 dBm effective-isotropic radiated power source at a distance of 68 m outdoors.