A Compact High-Efficiency Wideband Watt-Level RF Rectifier for Microwave Power Transfer

In this paper, a novel compact high-efficiency wideband watt-level RF rectifier is proposed for Microwave Power Transfer (MPT). Compared with the typical Schottky Barrier Diode (SBD) rectifier circuit, the input power level of the proposed rectifier is significantly improved without reducing rectification efficiency by utilizing integrated SBDs arrays. An LCC impedance matching network is proposed to cascade in the front end of a voltage-doubling rectification topology for increasing the bandwidth and doubling the power capacity of the rectifier. For validation, a rectifier with the center operating frequency at 433 MHz has been designed and fabricated. The measurement results shown that, the RF-dc conversion efficiency is higher than 76% with the input power at 30 dBm in the band between 383 MHz and 483 MHz. Moreover, the overall size of the rectifier circuit is only 3 cm × 3 cm (0.043 λ0 × 0.043 λ0). Therefore, the proposed compact wideband rectifier is suitable for watt-level power output MPT systems applications.