Fast Start-Up RF Energy Harvester Design for GSM-900 Uplink Band

In this brief, a co-design and integration of rectifier, antenna, and matching network are introduced in order to obtain a fast harvester with sufficient bandwidth to capture energy of the activity-dependent GSM-900 uplink signals. A tunable two-state matching network is proposed to improve the transient response of the harvester. A complete harvester comprising of a Schottky diode rectifier, small patch antenna and the proposed two-state matching network is designed and fabricated. Measurements show that the proposed matching network compared to the traditional fixed matching can result in about a 20% reduction in the charging time of the harvester for input available power of -10 dBm.