Wireless energy harvesting using serially connected voltage doublers

A major obstacle of wireless energy harvesting is to convert relatively low power wireless RF energy into sufficiently high DC voltage for practical use. This paper explores and studies a topology where several voltage doublers are connected in series to boost up the DC output voltage from the wireless energy harvesting circuits. A prototype has been designed and fabricated to test the feasibility of the proposed topology. With five voltage doublers in series, a resultant DC voltage of as high as 1.23 V can be obtained when an omni-directional antenna is transmitted at a power level of 20 dBm from a distance 3 m away from the prototype.