A novel fully-integrated dropless voltage CMOS rectifier for wirelessly powered devices

We present in this paper a new topology of a full-wave passive rectifier. It uses MOS transistors as low-loss switches to achieve significant increase in its overall power efficiency and negligible voltage drop across them. The highest voltages available in the circuit are used to drive the gate of a transistor in order to reduce the leakages and to lower the channel resistance while having high transconductance. It is implemented using standard TSMC 0.18 um CMOS process and is characterized by SpectreS simulator under the Cadence environment. The proposed full-wave rectifier is targeted for wirelessly powered applications such as neural stimulators. In the nominal source amplitude it allows improving the power efficiency by 10% and average output voltage by 16% comparing with other published results.