Solar/Electromagnetic Energy Harvesting and Wireless Power Transmission

This paper presents a review of existing works and solutions in the field of solar/electromagnetic energy harvesting and wireless power transmission. More specifically, the paper covers: solar/electromagnetic harvesters where solar antenna structures are used to obtain a compact implementation, direct current (dc) combining circuits necessary to combine the outputs of the solar and the electromagnetic harvesters, and efficient solar-to-electromagnetic (EM) converters that can be used to synthesize autonomous wireless power transmission radio-frequency (RF) signal generators. Finally, novel topologies to minimize the sensitivity of rectifier circuits to variations in the received RF power levels are presented.Grant number : This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Project TEC2012-39143 (SOSRAD), and the COST Action IC1301 ‘‘Wireless Power Transmission for Sustainable Electronics" (WIPE).© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works