A 60-GHz rectenna for monolithic wireless sensor tags

Gao, H.
Johannsen, U.
Matters - Kammerer, M.
Milosevic, D.
Smolders, A.B.
Roermund, van, A.H.M.
Baltus, P.G.M.

Open link

Publication date

January 2013

DOI

10.1109/iscas.2013.6572459

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a 60-GHz rectenna with an on-chip antenna and rectifier in 65nm CMOS technology. The rectenna is often the bottleneck in realizing a fully-integrated monolithic wireless sensor tag. In this paper, problems of the mm-wave rectifier are discussed, and the self-threshold voltage modulation method is proposed for better sensitivity and efficiency. Based on this discussion, the design of a 60 GHz rectenna is provided. The designed on-chip antenna has 2 dBi gain at 60 GHz. The designed rectifier reaches 4.4% efficiency with 7 dBm input power with a 1.5 k¿ load in simulation