A MEMS-boosted Over-the-Air RF Energy Harvester for IoT Receivers

In this work, a novel over-the-air (OTA) radio frequency (RF) energy harvester (EH) architecture implementing a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) as matching network is presented. The system operates at a frequency of 820 MHz and is composed of a sub-50 Ω single-meandered antenna on printed circuit board, a MEMS film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR), and a Schkotty diode half-bridge full wave rectifier followed by a sample-and-hold circuit.Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of the FBAR leads to an improvement of the energy harvester’s efficiency, resulting in a 8-fold increase of the harvested power compared to a system without the MEMS resonator. This first demonstration of an increased efficiency over-the-air energy harvester implementing MEMS resonator representS an encouraging and viable solution for ultra-low or zero-power electronic devices for Internet of Things applications, including distributed and remote sensor networks.