An RF energy harvester with supply management for co-integration into a 2.4 GHz transceiver

This paper presents an RF energy harvester embedded in a low-power transceiver (TRX) front-end. Both the harvester and the TRX use the same antenna and operate at the same frequency of 2.4 GHz using a new topology with a start-up rectifier and exploiting the nonlinear impedance of the RF-DC converter for decoupling the harvester from the TRX. The harvester also includes a supply management circuit for charging energy storage devices. It has been implemented in a 130 nm CMOS process and achieves a measured peak power conversion efficiency of 15.9% with little impact on the TRX performance (less than 0.5dB degradation of output power and noise figure). For input power levels of at least -9 dBm, it is able to charge up a supply capacitor to a regulated voltage of 1.34 V. The complete harvester occupies only 0.019 mm².