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

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 85μΑ. The simulated maximum power efficiency of the complete RF harvester is 66%.