A miniaturized printed rectenna for wireless RF energy harvesting around 2.45 GHz

This paper presents the design of a highly compact printed rectenna for ambient RF energy harvesting around 2.45 GHz. Its antenna structure comprises a rectangular patch with two etched U-shaped slots fed by a symmetric 50 Ω coplanar line. In spite of compact size, it has been directly integrated with a rectifying circuit on the same substrate only at the expense of a 15% frequency shift. The proposed rectenna overall dimension is only 24.9 × 8.6 × 1.6 mm3, the smallest so far reported with comparable performance, which can be easily integrated with any device for energizing low-power wireless sensor networks. It was fabricated and experimentally characterized, achieving a reasonable agreement with the expected simulated results. Measured results indicate that, at the resonant frequency, the antenna part of the proposed rectenna provides a good matching level (