Miniature Circularly Polarized Rectenna With Reduced Out-of-Band Harmonics

Wireless embedded sensors are becoming increasingly important for many safety critical applications. Sensor batteries or capacitors must be charged as needed in order to achieve high data rate communications. A miniature circularly polarized rectenna operating at 5.5 GHz is introduced which, with the help of an integrated band-reject filter, reduces out-of-band harmonic emission significantly. The rectenna has a conversion efficiency of 74% with more than 50 dB out-of-band harmonic suppression at 11 GHz.