Tunnel FET-based ultra-low power, high-sensitivity UHF RFID rectifier

Hetero-junction Tunnel FET (HTFET) for ultra-low power RF circuit design has been explored at the device and circuit level. In this paper, benchmarking and design insights for optimizing the performance of the TFET based differential drive rectifier is presented. Our evaluation of the HTFET based rectifier demonstrates its promise compared to the state-of-art passive RFIDs. With the 10-stage optimized TFET rectifier at 915 MHz, PCE of 98% with 0.5 nW power consumption, sensitivity of -24dBm for 9 μW P_DC and sensitivity of -33dBm for 0.4μW P_DC were achieved.