[2022] Fully Integrated RF Energy Harvesting for Autonomous IoT Devices

As wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT) continue to expand in industrial, biomedical and consumer applications, self-sustained power solutions are becoming a key technology where direct power is impractical or battery replacement is impossible.

Amongst different energy harvesting (EH) technologies, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting have become a promising solution to power next generation wireless networks in urban environments. The RF EH technique exploits available ambient power that allows the wireless devices to harvest energy from the RF signals, which are green renewable energy sources. The available RF power around us includes Wi-Fi, GSM, 3G, 4G, 5G, etc. However, the state-of-the-art RF EH systems still suffer from large form factor, low energy efficiency and cold-start issues. [1][2]

In this project, we are going to develop a RF energy harvesting circuit and system to power IoT devices or wireless sensors. The designed EH integrated circuit enable high RF power extraction efficiency, inductor-less design (small form factor). We will also enable the designed RF EH system to be started from the cold state (cold-start) at various RF power levels targeting at different RF signals.

[1] D. Khan et al., "An Efficient Reconfigurable RF-DC Converter With Wide Input Power Range for RF Energy Harvesting," in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 79310-79318, 2020.

[2] P. Xu, D. Flandre and D. Bol, "A Self-Gating RF Energy Harvester for Wireless Power Transfer With High-PAPR Incident Waveform," in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 56, no. 6, pp. 1816-1826, June 2021.

Assignment

1. Literature review of RF energy harvesting topologies and associated power management circuits.
2. Design of a highly efficient CMOS circuit for the proposed RF energy harvesting system. Tape-out is possible depending on the design and available time.

Requirements

You should be familiar with analog IC design and Cadence environment. If you are interested, please send your CV, BSc transcripts and MSc grades (obtained to date) to Sijun Du at email: Sijun.Du@tudelft.nl

Contact

Last modified: 2022-12-29