IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

11, 2012 929

Design of a High-Efficiency 2.45-GHz Rectenna

for Low-Input-Power Energy Harvesting
Hucheng Sun, Yong-xin Guo, Senior Member, IEEE, Miao He, and Zheng Zhong

Abstract—This letter presents a high-efficiency 2.45-GHz

rectenna that can harvest low input RF power effectively. A
new antenna with a simple structure and high gain of 8.6 dBi is
proposed for the rectenna. The antenna is designed to directly
match the rectifying circuit at 2.45 GHz and mismatch it at the
second and third harmonics so that the use of bandpass filter
between the antenna and rectifying circuit can be eliminated. The
rectenna shows a maximum conversion efficiency of 83% with a
load resistance of 1400 . Furthermore, the overall conversion
efficiency can remain 50% for the low, 17.2 dBm (corresponding
power density 0.22 W cm ) input power level.
Index Terms—Antenna, energy harvesting, rectenna, rectifier.
Fig. 1. Circuit configuration of the proposed rectenna.

I. INTRODUCTION
In this letter, a 2.45-GHz rectenna for harvesting low-power
RF energy is presented. The rectenna’s efficiency for low input

R ECENTLY, RF energy harvesting has gained a lot of

attention since RF power is widely broadcast from
numerous reliable electromagnetic resources. Therefore, it
is meaningful to collect and utilize it as the supply energy
for many electrical devices like headsets, wearable medical
sensors, battery-free remote sensors for industrial control, and
so on.
A rectifying antenna (rectenna), which can receive and con-
vert the microwave power to dc power, plays a crucial role in the
RF energy harvesting process. Therefore, considerable research
has been placed on rectennas using different kinds of antennas,
for instance, dipole antennas [1], [2], circularly polarized
antennas [3]–[5], dual-frequency antennas [6]–[8], electrically
small antennas [9], harmonic suppression antennas [10], fractal
antennas [11], and so forth. However, most of those rectennas
do not aim at application for low input power, so they require
either relatively high input RF power or exhibit unsatisfying
efficiencies at low input power. Since the ambient RF energy
resources are usually of low power level, rectennas with high
efficiency for low input power are greatly preferred. Antenna
arrays [11], [12] can be used as an effective means to increase
the rectenna’s capability for low input power, but there is a
tradeoff between the rectenna size and its performance [13].
power is improved from two aspects. First, a high-gain yet
compact antenna is designed for the rectenna, overcoming
the tradeoff between the size and the gain if an antenna array
is applied. Since the effective aperture area of an antenna is
proportional to its gain, the use of a high-gain antenna is able to
receive more power for rectification to a great extent when the
incident power is low. Second, as shown in Fig. 1, the antenna is
co-designed with the rectifier, and their matching performance
is optimized at low input power points. Therefore, the novel
rectenna in this letter is sufficiently capable of recycling low
RF power.
II. RECTENNA DESIGN
The rectenna is fabricated on a 25-mil-thick RT/Duroid 6002
substrate with a dielectric constant of 2.94 and loss tangent of
0.0012. The main configuration is shown in Fig. 1. This antenna
receives RF power at 2.45 GHz and transmits it to the Schottky
HSMS-2852 diode through a coplanar stripline (CPS). The ca-
pacitor acts as a dc-pass filter to prevent microwave power from
reaching the load and reflects it back to the diode to be con-
verted again. A resistive load is placed at the end to extract the
dc power.

Manuscript received July 24, 2012; accepted August 02, 2012. Date of publi-
cation August 07, 2012; date of current version August 23, 2012. This work was
supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund
Tier 1 under Project R-263-000-667-112.
H. C. Sun, Y.-X. Guo, and Z. Zhong are with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117576,
Singapore (e-mail: eleguoyx@nus.edu.sg).
M. He is with the Institute of Electronic Engineering, Peking University, Bei-
jing 100871, China.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2012.2212232
A. Antenna Design
As the antenna is to be directly matched to the rectifier, its
input impedance needs to be determined first. Hence, the soft-
ware Advanced Design System (ADS) has been used to charac-
terize the input impedance of the rectifier. At the first stage, a
preliminary rectifier containing only lumped elements, a diode,
a capacitor, and a resistor was optimized under low input power
with the goal of high efficiency. After optimization, the recti-
fier’s input impedance of around was obtained for

1536-1225/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE

930 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

Fig. 2. Configuration of the proposed antenna. (a) Top view. (b) Side view. The
parameters are: mm, mm, mm, mm,
mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, Fig. 4. (a) Photograph of the fabricated antenna with transition and matching
mm, , and mm. circuit. (b) Configuration of the transition and matching circuit part. The param-
eters are: mm, mm, mm, mm,
mm, mm, mm, mm, mm,
mm, mm, and .

Fig. 3. Input impedance of the antenna versus frequency for various stub
length .

Fig. 5. Simulated and measured of the antenna with transition and

the following antenna design. Since the output voltage of the an- matching circuit.
tenna increases with larger load impedance for the same input
power, which merits the conversion efficiency of the diode, a
rectifier with such impedance tends to have higher efficiency
than those with normally used 50- impedance.
The proposed antenna is shown in Fig. 2. It is utilized be-
cause it can achieve high gain with a simple structure and its
input impedance can be easily adjusted by carefully tuning the
length of the stub . Fig. 3 shows how the impedance changes
according to the stub length . The final stub length of 9.5 mm is
selected so that the antenna is matched to the diode impedance.
To create the unidirectional radiation and increase the antenna
gain, a reflecting plane is put behind the antenna.
The proposed antenna is fed by CPS, which cannot be mea- Fig. 6. Simulated and measured radiation patterns at 2.45 GHz for the antenna
sured directly. Hence, a CPS-to-microstrip transition [14] and a in (a) E-plane ( -plane) and (b) H-plane.( -plane).
double-stub tuning matching circuit are designed to transform
the CPS to a 50- microstrip. The fabricated antenna with tran-
sition and matching circuit is shown in Fig. 4. A good agree- caused by the inaccuracy of the fabrication and the measure-
ment can be found from the comparison between simulated and ment system. The front-to-back ratio of the radiation reaches
measured plotted in Fig. 5. The measured is 22 dB 24 dB in the broadside direction of E-plane, while the cross po-
at 2.45 GHz and the 10-dB bandwidth is 3%, revealing good larization is less than 24 dB for the E-plane. Broad beamwidth
performance of the transition and matching circuit. Fig. 6 illus- can be observed in H-plane. Its half-power beamwidth (HPBW)
trates the simulated and measured radiation patterns in E-plane is about 60 , which is a benefit as the alignment of the rectenna
and H-plane at 2.45 GHz. The simulated peak gain is 9.8 dBi, does not need to be very precise to keep the conversion effi-
while the measured one is 8.6 dBi. This discrepancy may be ciency constant.
SUN et al.: HIGH-EFFICIENCY 2.45-GHz RECTENNA FOR LOW-INPUT-POWER ENERGY HARVESTING 931

Fig. 7. Current distribution on the antenna at 2.45 GHz.

Fig. 8. Rectenna measurement system.

Current distribution on the antenna at 2.45 GHz is demon-
strated in Fig. 7. It can be noticed that the currents on the two
pairs of arms are ordered and symmetrical; they flow in the same
direction with the same phase. Thus, this antenna can be viewed
as a two-element dipole array. In addition, due to the image of
the antenna produced by the reflecting plate, this antenna can
perform a gain that is about four times as high as that of a single
dipole. It also can be observed that the currents on the two stubs
are at a similar intensity level but opposite in direction. Hence,
their effects on the antenna radiation counteract each other, in-
dicating that tuning the stubs almost has no influence on the ra-
diation pattern.
Fig. 9. (a) Simulated and measured efficiency and output voltage values of
B. Rectifier Design the rectenna as a function of input power with 2800- resistor at 2.45 GHz.
(b) Photograph of the fabricated rectenna.
The rectifier consists of a Schottky diode, a dc-pass filter, and
a resistive load. The Schottky HSMS-2852 diode was chosen
because it has a low built-in voltage with fast switching response III. RECTENNA MEASUREMENT
and high cutoff frequency. It is shunted across the CPS. To re-
The rectenna was tested in an anechoic chamber. The mea-
duce the size of the rectifier, a capacitor has been simply con-
surement system is illustrated in Fig. 8. A standard horn antenna
nected to the CPS in parallel to act as a dc-pass filter.
was used for transmitting power at 2.45 GHz. First, the proposed
Because of the nonlinear characteristics of the diode, it can
antenna was placed in a fixed position, and its received power
generate some high-order harmonics that may be radiated by the
was measured through a spectrum analyzer. Then, the antenna
antenna. To block these harmonics and increase the efficiency
was replaced by the rectenna in the same position. By measuring
of this rectifier, a bandpass filter is commonly inserted between
the voltage across the resistor, the conversion efficiency can be
the antenna and the rectifier. In this design, we tried to make the
obtained by
antenna matched to the rectifier at 2.45 GHz and mismatched it
at high-order harmonics so that the harmonics can be obstructed
and the use of the bandpass filter can be eliminated. (1)
In the design process, the input impedance of the antenna was
imported to ADS for the simulation of the rectifier. The values where is the voltage on the resistor, is the resistance
and positions of the capacitor and the resistor were adjusted value, and is the input power level sensed by the rectenna,
to optimize the matching performance and the conversion effi- which is equal to . By this means, the use of Friis transmission
ciency. The influences of higher-order harmonics were studied, equation can be avoided.
and it was found that the harmonics higher than third order al- The simulated and measured efficiency and output voltage
most have no effect on the efficiency. Therefore, we only fo- values of the rectenna as a function of input power with a
cused on the matching performance at fundamental frequency 2800- resistor at 2.45 GHz are depicted in Fig. 9(a). It is
while suppressing the second- and third-order harmonics. The seen that when the input power is 7.7 dBm, the measured
input impedances of the antenna at 2.45, 4.9, and 7.35 GHz are efficiency achieves its peak value of 75.5%. When the input
, , and , respec- power is decreased to 17.2 dBm, the efficiency can still
tively. Thus, the optimization goal of the rectifier in ADS was remain 50%. The output voltage of the rectenna always goes
set to be matched to the first input impedance and mismatched up with increasing input power. It gets 1 V for input power of
to the next two. Hence, there is no filter required in this design, 3.2 dBm.
which makes this rectenna more compact. Moreover, the elimi- The power level of each harmonic term at the point before the
nation of the insertion loss of the filter also benefits the rectenna diode is analyzed by simulation, plotted in Fig. 10(a). It shows
efficiency. The optimized capacitor and the resistor values were that the power level of the fundamental frequency term is al-
selected to be 3.3 pF and 2800 . most equal to the input power, and the power of the high-order
932 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

With larger resistance, the efficiency tends to be lower for input

power larger than 15 dBm. The peak efficiency of 83% can
be achieved for a resistor of 1400 . Fig. 11(b) takes into ac-
count the antenna’s performance as the power density is the re-
ceived power divided by antenna’s effective aperture size. With
a 2800- resistor, the overall efficiency keeps higher than 50%
when the power density is more than 0.2 W cm , proving that
this rectenna could be profitably adopted in low-power RF en-
ergy harvesting applications.

Fig. 10. (a) Simulated power level of each harmonic term at the point between
the antenna and the rectifier circuit. (b) Simulated power level of each harmonic IV. CONCLUSION
term on the resistor.
This letter points out a way to design a rectenna that can work
at low input power. A high-efficiency 2.45-GHz rectenna with
simple structure and compact size has been proposed and in-
vestigated. It is demonstrated that the overall efficiency of the
proposed rectenna can achieve 80.3% and 50% with power den-
sity of 1.95 and 0.22 W cm , respectively. Since the RF-to-dc
conversion efficiency has emerged as an urgent and challenge-
able issue in nowadays low-power RF energy harvesting, this
study can be treated as a very pointed attempt in this respect.

Fig. 11. Measured efficiency values of the rectenna as functions of (a) input
power and (b) power density with different resistors at 2.45 GHz.
harmonics is extremely small, proving that this impedance mis-
match method suppresses the high-order harmonics quite well.
Also, the power level of each harmonic term at the output is
plotted in Fig. 10(b). It is seen that the desired dc power is dom-
inating, revealing the good performance of the dc-pass filter.
Fig. 11 delivers the measured efficiency values of the rectenna
as functions of input power and power density with different re-
sistors at 2.45 GHz. Resistors of 1400, 2800, and 4200 are
chosen for the investigation. In fact, Fig. 11(a) only shows the
efficiency performance of the rectifier since the horizontal axis
denotes the power input to the rectifier. It can be seen that the ef-
ficiency curves are sensitive to the change of the resistor values.
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