A Rectenna for RF Energy Harvesting for Application in Powering IoT Devices

A rectenna is designed for harvesting the RF energy at 2.45 GHz WiFi band. The proposed rectenna comprises a receiving antenna coupled to a rectifier circuit using a matching network. For the receiving antenna, an electrically small antenna of size
$0.22\lambda\times 0.16\lambda\times 0.013\lambda$
with 1.19 dBi peak gain is used. A simple transmission line based matching network is designed to match the antenna input impedance with the rectifier impedance. The rectifier uses two HSMS-2850 Schottky diodes in a voltage doubler configuration. As a result, an improved power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 66.8% is achieved. The proposed rectenna can be useful for powering low-power IoT devices.