Comparative Study of Lumped and Distributed-Element Matching Networks on Performance of 2.45 GHz Rectifier

In this paper, a 2.45 GHz rectifier for energy harvesting is presented. The contribution of this paper is to show the effect of two different techniques of impedance matching on the Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE) of the same design of the rectifier. The first technique involves an L-section matching, where the rectification circuit is designed using four different LC networks. The second technique involves simulating two circuits based on single stub matching. The rectifier based on lumped elements achieves a PCE of 45% with varying input power and resistive load. On the other hand, the rectifier using distributed elements achieves a PCE of approximately 35%. They achieve the same output voltage (1.875 V). Additionally, the lumped-element matching approach results in a smaller-sized rectifier. However, it is more sensitive to error as even small variations in the values of inductors or capacitors can cause significant deviations in the return loss.