High Efficiency Voltage Doubler Rectifier Design for Harvesting ambient RF Energy

The voltage-doubler (VD) rectifier circuits are the most used in the rectennas design. In this paper, a method of designing a highly efficient Schenkel VD is proposed. The choice of the rectifying diode is first established according to measurements of ambient power density carried over in the literature. By using the filter Design tool of the Advanced Design System (ADS) software, a band-pass filter is designed to ensure a good power transfer between the antenna and the rectifier circuit. The filter elements are then optimized by the gradient method search to achieve optimum performance in the GSM band. Especially for a power density of 39 nW/cm
²
, the designed circuit associated with a 10 dBi gain antenna shows a conversion efficiency of 55%.