A COMPARATIVE STUDY: VOLTAGE MULTIPLIERS FOR RF ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM

Abstract

Voltage multipliers are widely used for energy harvesting processes to convert the received AC signal to DC signal, also enhanced the low level received signal. In this study, Villard, Dickson and Greinacher type voltage multipliers are analyzed without impedance matching and substrate materials to decide the effective voltage multiplier type depend on the inputs of the harvester. So, load resistance, input power and input frequencies’ effects are analyzed and compared with each other. Agilent Advanced Design System (ADS) is used for simulations. HSMS 2852 Schottky diode and capacitors are used for these voltage multipliers. Results show that, determining load resistance is important for evaluating high efficiency, e.g. efficiency differences are reached 33% between 2kΩ and 20 kΩ for Dickson voltage multiplier at 100 MHz input frequency. Furthermore, the best efficiency is obtained by Greinacher voltage multiplier for low input frequencies which is lower than 1 GHz but there are no significant differences are observed for high frequencies. This study shows that load resistance, input frequency and input power are important parameters for voltage multiplier selection and Greinacher voltage multiplier is the best choice to obtain high efficiency for low frequency application of RF harvesting.