A Wideband 20 mW UHF Rectifier in CMOS

Abstract

This letter presents the first CMOSFET RF-to-DC Rectifier IC which delivers more than 10 mW dc power at GHz frequency. This IC utilizes the single-ended In-phase Gate-boosting Rectifier (IGR) architecture, and its In-Phase Voltage Multiplier (IPVM) is derived from a lambda/2 transmission line to boost in-phase V-GS from the driving V-DS. This simultaneously reduces the effective threshold voltage, forward resistance, and reverse leakage current of the rectifying transistors. To improve an IGR\'s performance, both RF source-pull and dc load-pull are carried out to find the optimal performance. The UHF IGR is implemented using thick-gate-oxide I/O transistors with 0.28 mu m minimum gate length in TSMC 65 nm CMOS process. The implemented IC achieves a 20 mW output dc power with 31.8% peak efficiency at 900 MHz with 200 MHz 1 dB bandwidth.