An RF powering system with adaptive impedance matching for individual health monitoring applications

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2016 Aug:2016:4983-4986. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2016.7591846.

Abstract

This paper presents a high-efficiency RF powering system, suitable for individual health monitoring applications. The system is composed of an antenna, an impedance matching network, and a two-stage full-wave RF-DC rectifier. A novel tuning mechanism is proposed to automatically adjust the impedance of the matching network. This mechanism can effectively improve the power efficiency of the system by 47% compared to the case without tuning. For the adaptive impedance, only a 5-bits binary weighted capacitor bank is required in the matching network. The complete system, designed in a standard 0.13μm CMOS technology, converts a -6dBm 915MHz RF signal to a 1.7V DC voltage with an output current of 85μA. The simulated maximum power efficiency of the complete RF harvester is 66%.

MeSH terms

  • Electric Impedance*
  • Electric Power Supplies*
  • Equipment Design
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / instrumentation*
  • Radio Waves