An Efficient 2.4 GHz Differential Rectenna for Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting

This paper presents a rectenna to harvest RF energy at the ISM band of 2.4 GHz. A differential topology for the rectifier, along with microstrip patch antennas, are adopted to eliminate a power splitter at the input and a voltage adder at the output reducing the ohmic loss and leakage. The rectenna is prototyped on Rogers 4003C substrate. The measurement results indicate that the proposed rectenna achieves the peak power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 69.3 %, while delivering 5.1 mW to the load.