CNFET Based Voltage Multiplier Circuit for RF Energy Harvesting Applications

Low power portable devices are becoming widely used in the consumer electronics. The battery life time of such devices are becoming more important and reason for concern. In order to guarantee a sufficiently long lifetime, the devices should be self-rechargeable/self-powered by harvesting energy from its environment. Amongst the non-CMOS devices, CNFET is regarded as a promising alternative of CMOS devices. Hence, it is imperative to explore alternative beyond-CMOS technology for their rapid commercialization. This paper makes an attempt in this direction. It proposes a CNFET based voltage multiplier / rectifier circuit for RF (radio frequency) energy harvesting applications. The proposed passive multi-stage RF/DC voltage multiplier / rectifier circuit uses ac input signal of 60 mV to produce a dc output voltage of 389 mV, which is sufficient to drive circuits & systems in sub threshold region for ultralow power applications.