Design and implementation of passive RF-DC converters for RF power harvesting systems

In RF energy harvesting scheme, the acquired voltage level is too low to be considered as a supply voltage of applications such as microsensors. Therefore, there is a need to increase this value, and passive voltage multiplier is a solution to this requirement. In this project, two passive voltage multipliers, namely, Modified Dickson (MDVM) and Mandal-Sarpeshkar (MSVM) voltage multipliers are designed and implemented. From a mere input power of 10 μW to 60 μW at 13.56 MHz, the voltage multipliers effectively increased the output voltage to 905 mV to 2.128 V and 1.114 V to 3.609 V for MDVM and MSVM, respectively, given a supply voltage of 1 V and a capacitive load of 30 pF. All designs are implemented using 90 nm CMOS process.