Low Cost Compact Rectifier for RF Energy Harvesting

RF energy harvesting is the process of acquiring ambient RF energy and converting it into a suitable form for storage for powering low power devices. This paper describes a low cost rectifier operating at 1.8 GHz for energy harvesting applications. Rectifier is fabricated on lossy FR4 substrate and better impedance matching is achieved by incorporating a short stub and two open stubs. It has an efficiency of 63% and an output voltage of 0.8V at 0dBm input power. Source pulling technique is used to optimize the design. Compactness as well as low cost make this rectifier attractive for RF energy harvesting