A ZeroPower DC voltage-to-RF impedance converter enabling sustainable & frugal wireless sensor networks

Amidst climate change and raw material shortages that begin to impact our society, the crucial role of engineers is to invent tools that enable citizens to regulate their footprint. Field sensors associated with control engineering have proven so far to be a very effective way to save energy. Unfortunately, many "smart sensors" are deployed today at a huge footprint cost (the global impact of carbon footprint in the electronics industry is currently larger than the traditional car and truck industry and is still rising). This paper introduces a way to turn any DC voltage sensors -- with a special emphasis on frugal sensors -- into wireless systems towards the dawn of sustainable wireless sensor networks.A proof of principle is reported with a theoretical backscattering operation distance of 20 m ( at −15-dBm input), and with input sensor voltage down to 300 mV, yielding 19% modulation depth for backscattering.