A Novel High Efficiency CMOS RF/DC Power Harvester Based on Constant ON/OFF Time Buck Controller for 60GHz Frequency Band

Abstract

A novel 60 GHz RF/DC power harvesting system is presented. The system consists of RF to DC rectifier and a DC/DC Buck converter based on constant ON/OFF time (COOT) control. The rectifier has a structure of voltage doubler, but employs diodes that have lower parasitics compared to those of the standard MOSFET diodes, resulting in improved power conversion efficiency. The peak efficiency of the rectifier obtained with the extracted parasitics for the output power of 1 mW is about 25%. In order to keep the output voltage of the system to 1.2 V, the COOT control in the Buck converter is used. COOT control has much better efficiency at low output powers compared to the PWM systems. For correct operation of the COOT control, auxiliary sub-blocks: a low power high-speed comparator, a hysteresis comparator, and a high-speed voltage reference are designed and presented. The maximum switching frequency in the Buck converter is about 100MHz and the whole control system has very low static power consumption. The efficiency of the overall system for the output power of 1mW is about 21%. The system is designed in 65 nm CMOS technology.