X-band energy harvester with miniaturized on-chip slot antenna implemented in 0.18-μm RF CMOS

This paper presents a novel fully integrated X-band energy harvester, with on-chip antenna, matching network, and a multi-stage RF-DC rectifier implemented in IBM 0.18-μm RF CMOS technology. We investigated different matching schemes, antennas, and rectifiers with focus on the interaction between building blocks. Among different matching topologies, the series inductive scheme demonstrated the best performance for X-band to DC energy conversion. Our measurement results show that the proposed X-band RF-DC rectifier generates a 1.23 V DC output with 304 KΩ load at 9.2 GHz with -8.0 dBm input RF power, providing a power conversion efficiency of 3.1%.