IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

4, 2005 187

Analytical Models for Low-Power Rectenna Design

J. A. G. Akkermans, M. C. van Beurden, Member, IEEE, G. J. N. Doodeman, and H. J. Visser, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—The design of a low-cost rectenna for low-power appli-

cations is presented. The rectenna is designed with the use of ana-
lytical models and closed-form analytical expressions. This allows
for a fast design of the rectenna system. To acquire a small-area
rectenna, a layered design is proposed. Measurements indicate the
validity range of the analytical models.
Fig. 1. Schematic rectenna system.
Index Terms—Microstrip patch antenna, rectenna, rectifier,
wireless power transmission.

I. INTRODUCTION

W IRELESS power transfer is a promising technique for

the long-term power supply of wireless applications
[1]. In this paper, we will focus on wireless power transfer Fig. 2. Electric circuit for the Schottky diode.
via electromagnetic radiation, as opposed to inductive power
transfer for example. The key component for this type of wire-
less power transfer is the rectenna. A rectenna is a combination II. RECTENNA SETUP
of a rectifying circuit and an antenna. The antenna receives the The general setup of a rectenna is shown in Fig. 1. This setup
electromagnetic power and the rectifying circuit converts it to is different from the setup proposed by Heikkinen et al. [2],
electric power. which has an impedance matching circuit between antenna and
The amount of power that can be transferred is limited. The rectifying circuit. This matching circuit can be avoided when
transmitted power is limited by regulations and the received the antenna and rectifying circuit are designed such that they
power is attenuated, mainly due to free-space path loss. In gen- are already matched. For this purpose the behavior of the an-
eral, portable devices have small dimensions. Therefore, the tenna and rectifying circuit have to be modeled at and around
rectenna should have small dimensions as well. This results in a the operating frequency.
small antenna area and, consequently, a low amount of received
power. Because of these limitations, wireless power transfer is A. Antenna
mainly suitable for low-power applications, e.g., a low-power A probe-fed microstrip patch antenna is utilized as an an-
wireless sensor. tenna. The advantages of this type of antenna are its small di-
To be able to use wireless power transfer, an efficient rectenna mensions and the ease of manufacturing, making it a low-cost
is needed. In the presented work, the rectenna is modeled with antenna. An advantage of the feeding technique is the separation
analytical and closed-form analytical models. This allows for a of the electric circuit and the antenna via the ground plane. The
fast design of the rectenna system and it provides a good insight input impedance of the microstrip patch antenna is calculated
in the effect of the several parameters on the performance of the with a cavity model [3]. Effective dimensions are introduced to
rectenna. incorporate the effect of fringe fields at the edges of the patch.
In the experiments described in the remainder of this paper, The input impedance varies with the probe position. This prop-
we assume a received RF power level of 0 dBm at a central erty is utilized to acquire a matched design.
operating frequency of 2.45 GHz. This frequency lies in a li-
cense-free industrial, scientific, and medical band where the B. Rectifying Circuit
maximum radiated power is in general 20 dBm. Received RF
power levels of 0 dBm and less are expected for practical appli- The main component of the rectifying circuit is the Schottky
diode, which is modeled by the electric circuit shown in Fig. 2.
cations in this frequency band.
The model for the Schottky diode consists of a substrate resis-
tance , a junction capacitance , which is assumed to have a
linear voltage-current relation, and a nonlinear diode , which
Manuscript received February 28, 2005; revised April 20, 2005. has a voltage-current characteristic given by
J. A. G. Akkermans and M. C. van Beurden are with the Telecommunica-
tion Technology and Electromagnetics Division, Eindhoven University of Tech- (1)
nology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (e-mail: j.a.g.akkermans@tue.nl).
G. J. N. Doodeman and H. J. Visser are with TNO Industrial Technology,
Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Here, is the current through the nonlinear diode, is the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2005.850798 voltage over the nonlinear diode, is the saturation current,
1536-1225/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

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188 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005

and is the reciprocal of the thermal voltage. Here, Here, and determine the amplitude and phase of the equiva-
is the charge of an electron, is the temperature in Kelvin, lent Thévenin voltage source. and determine the output
and is the diode ideality factor. impedance of the source, where represents the resistance and
The input impedance of the Schottky diode has to be deter- is a measure for the inductance or capacitance. The resulting
mined to be able to match the rectifying circuit to the antenna. error term is given by
Therefore, the voltage over and current through the diode have
to be evaluated. A possible approach is to solve the differen-
tial equations of the total electric circuit in the time domain.
The drawback of this approach is that the system of differential
equations can become rather large when the Schottky diode is (6)
mounted in an extensive electric circuit. Therefore, we follow a
different approach. The linear parts of the circuit are evaluated The closed-form solution of this integral can be found in [7, eq.
in the frequency domain whereas the nonlinear diode is evalu- 3.937] and is given by
ated in the time domain.
During stationary opeartion, the current through the nonlinear
diode can be represented by a sum of harmonics, i.e.,

(2)
(7)
Here, represents the direct current and , represent the
with
amplitudes of the harmonic terms, operating at the radial fre-
quency . For each of the harmonic terms, the equivalent
Thévenin circuit of the linear circuit is determined. If the cur-
(8)
rent is given, the voltage at the output of the linear circuit is
known. This voltage is used to determine the current through Here, and are the modified Bessel functions of the first kind
the diode. Since the current at the output of the linear network of order 0 and 1, respectively.
is equal to the current through the diode, we can find the coeffi- When higher harmonics ( ) have to be taken into ac-
cients and by minimizing the square of the error between count, the integral of (3) is evaluated numerically.
and over one period of time [4], i.e.,
C. Filter
(3) To avoid unwanted power dissipation, the harmonics gener-
ated by the diode need extra attention. To avoid dissipation of
The coefficients , can be found via a multidimensional the harmonics in the load, a radial stub that is placed between
minimization method, e.g., a simplex method [5]. the Schottky diode and the load is utilized as a bandstop filter.
Once the coefficients and are known, the input An analytical model of the radial stub is presented by Giannini
impedance of the diode can be determined. The number of et al. [8]. A model based on this theory is used in our design.
harmonics that should be taken into account to obtain an
accurate input impedance depends on the signal level. For large III. VERIFICATION
signals, more harmonics should be taken into account than for To verify the combined analytical and closed-form analytical
small signals, since the nonlinearity of the diode has a larger models of the antenna, Schottky diode and filter, a rectenna is
impact for these signals. constructed. This rectenna is not optimized for conversion ef-
If it is allowed to consider only a limited number of harmonics ficiency, but only serves the purpose of validation of the ana-
, we can find an analytical expression for (3). In the simplest lytical models described sofar. A schematic layout is shown in
case, only the dc term of the current is determined. For this Fig. 3. The rectifying circuit is placed perpendicular to the patch
case, a closed-form algebraic relation between input voltage and antenna for ease of construction. The radial stub is intended to
dc input current can be found [6]. In our case, this analysis is block the signal on the operating frequency such that it is not dis-
not sufficient, since it does not give an expression for the input sipated into the load. The coil is added to provide a dc short-cir-
impedance of the diode at RF frequencies. Therefore, we have cuit for the antenna. It is modeled as a parallel circuit of a re-
to include at least one harmonic term ( ) sistance, capacitance, and inductance of which the values have
been obtained from measurements.
(4) The most interesting properties of the rectenna are the dc
output voltage and the input impedance of the antenna and the
The voltage over the diode in the time domain can be modeled
rectifying circuit. The analytical model for the input impedance
using Thévenin’s theorem as
of the antenna is quite accurate as shown in [3]. The rectifying
circuit is modeled with and harmonic terms
(5) taken into account. The modeled and measured results for the

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AKKERMANS et al.: ANALYTICAL MODELS FOR LOW-POWER RECTENNA DESIGN 189

Fig. 3. Schematic layout of the rectenna.

Fig. 4. Input impedance of the rectifying circuit.RefZ g: model N = 1 5. DC output voltage rectifying circuit. Model N = 1 (dot), model N =
N=2
(), model ( ), measurement (solid). Im Z g: model N = 1(5), Fig.
f 2 (dash), measurement (solid).
model N =2 + ( ), measurement (dash).

input impedance of the rectifying circuit are shown in Fig. 4 for rectifying circuit as well. The conversion efficiency is defined
an input signal with a power level of 0 dBm and a dc load as the ratio of dc power to received power, i.e.,
. The choice for is arbitrary, but lies in the range of ex-
pected values for practical applications. For the Schottky diode (9)
we used the HSMS-2852 from Agilent Technologies [9]. The
corresponding dc output voltage is shown in Fig. 5.
In our design, additional radial stubs are placed between the
From Fig. 4 we observe that both models demonstrate an ac-
antenna and the rectifier to prevent the first harmonic from being
ceptable agreement between calculations and measurements of
reradiated by the antenna. This is necessary because the har-
the input impedance of the rectifying circuit at the frequency
monics of the operating frequency correspond closely to radi-
range of interest (2–3 GHz). Fig. 5, however, clearly shows the
ating modes of the patch antenna. Higher harmonics are excited
limited accuracy of the simpler model for the dc output voltage.
as well, but not as significant as the first harmonic. The filter
It demonstrates that at least two harmonic terms should be in-
structure between the antenna and the rectifying circuit can be
cluded to acquire an accurate prediction of the dc output voltage.
simplified when the harmonics generated by the rectifier do not
correspond to radiating modes of the antenna. This property is
IV. RECTENNA DESIGN
employed in [10], where circular patch antennas are used.
The main design parameters of the rectenna are the dimen- Between the rectifier and the load two radial stubs are also
sions and the conversion efficiency. To acquire a small-area placed. One radial stub prevents the signal at the operating fre-
rectenna, a layered design is proposed. The backside of the quency from being dissipated in the load and one radial stub
patch antenna is used for the rectifying circuit. As a result, the prevents the signal at the first harmonic frequency from being
ground plane of the antenna is used as a ground plane for the dissipated.

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190 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005

Fig. 7. DC output voltage of the stacked rectenna. Measurement (solid) and

model (dash).

V. CONCLUSION
Rectenna design with the use of analytical models was pre-
sented. These models allow for a fast design of rectenna systems
and enable an optimization of the rectenna layout for a large
number of parameters. The models were used to design a small
and efficient rectenna. The validity of the models was shown by
comparison with measurements.
Future work will include the following aspects. The loss tan-
gent of the used FR4 dielectric is relatively high compared to
other dielectric materials, e.g., microwave laminate. The use of
low-loss materials decreases the dielectric losses and is, there-
fore, beneficial for the efficiency. Finally, the dc output voltage
of the rectenna can be doubled if two diodes are used in the
rectifying circuit. A higher output voltage can increase the ap-
plicability of the rectenna.
Fig. 6. Layout of the stacked rectenna.
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