A Broadband Rectifier with Wide Input Power Dynamic Range Based on Automatic Power Adaption

This paper presents a broadband rectifier with wide input power range based on quadrature coupler. In this design, automatic power adaptation (APA) technique is employed and the rectifier is composed of a quadrature coupler and two sub-rectifiers. Both sub-rectifiers are directly connected to the output ports of the coupler and rectify radio frequency (RF) energy in different power level. Due to the characteristics of quadrature coupler, if the resistance of sub-rectifier mismatches of different input power, the power will be recycled and reflected to the sub-rectifier for rectifying again. In addition, due to the insensitive nature of the APA to frequency, the operation frequency will be expanded. For validation, a rectifier was fabricated and measured. The measurement results show that the peak RF-DC power conversion efficiency (PCE) is 70.4% and the PCE exceeding 50% of the input power range is 29.3 dB (from 0 dBm to 29.3 dBm). In addition, the PCE over 50 % is from 1.43 GHz to 2.7 GHz while exceed 60 % is from 1.46 GHz to 2.61 GHz.