Dickson Charge Pump Rectifier using Ultra-Low Power (ULP) Diode for BAN Applications

Abstract

High power consumption and small battery size severely limit the operating time of devices in Body Area Network (BAN). Radio Frequency (RF) harvesting system can be one of the ways to solve this constraint. Rectifier converts ambient RF into direct current (DC). In a conventional rectifier circuit, Schottky diodes have been considered as an attractive candidate due to their low forward voltage drop and fast switching speed. However, Schottky diodes are not properly modelled in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies which restrict their usefulness in low -cost applications, where high integration levels are desired. Thus, an efficient model of Schottky diode in an integrated circuit (IC) domain is needed. For this reason, Ultra-Low Power (ULP) diode has been proposed in the IC rectifier designs. The performance of ULP diode was compared with diode-connected MOSFET based on Dickson topology and Villard voltage multiplier in 130nm Silterra process technology. The correlation of the design parameters to the performance of voltage rectifier was analysed. The results show that the efficiency of the voltage multiplier has successfully increased more than double based on the optimisation of the design parameters.