An Enhanced Rectenna Using Differentially-Fed Rectifier for Wireless Power Transmission

This letter presents an enhanced rectenna with a differentially-driven rectifier for wireless power transmission applications. By utilizing differential feeding, a patch antenna with increased gain is proposed. To be directly connected with the differentially-fed patch antenna as a rectenna, a differentially-driven rectifier is designed so that the use of balun can be omitted. The rectenna shows a maximum efficiency of 73.9% under the input power density of 207 μW/cm
²
. Furthermore, compared with a reference rectenna of the same aperture size, the proposed rectenna performs higher efficiency and yields larger output DC power, which is more than 1.5 times as high as that of the reference rectenna.