A New Wide Power Dynamic Range CMOS RF-to-DC Converter Using Body-Control Scheme

RF harvesting has attracted the attention to be used as a power source for low-power systems like IoT, wireless sensor nodes, and wearable devices. The RF rectifier has been the bottleneck in achieving efficient RF-DC systems. This paper presents a new CMOS RF-DC converter design based on a body-control approach to control the ON & OFF states of the transistors. The design is constructed using the cross-coupled differential-drive (CCDD) rectifier. The design uses less number of capacitors compared to some reported designs in the literature, which savesmore active area. The proposed design has been implemented using 0.18 mu m TSMC CMOS technology and verified using Cadence Virtuoso EDA. Thanks to the body-control scheme, the design achieves wide power dynamic range (PDR) of 20 dBm and a peak power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 71.6% for one stage of the proposed design. In addition, the proposed design obtains an output voltage of 0.47 V for 10 k Omega and -15 dBm input power. It occupies an area of 0.0054 mm(2). The proposed structure is also implemented using three stages to achieve higher output voltage. The 3-stage rectifier achieves a PDR of 17.4 dBm and a peak PCE of 71.2%, and an output voltage of 1.6 V for 100 k Omega load and -14 dBm input power. Finally, the proposed RF-DC rectifier is compared with the state-of-the-art designs reported in the literature.

Automated summary

This paper presents a CMOS RF-DC converter design based on a body-control approach to improve the efficiency of RF rectifiers. The design uses fewer capacitors, saving active area, and achieves high power conversion efficiency and output voltage.