Small-footprint wideband 94GHz rectifier for swarm micro-robotics

Abstract

A very small footprint rectifier designed to support the micro-robotic applications is proposed and presented in this paper. The frequency of 94GHz has been selected as the best tradeoff between receiving antenna size and available transmitter power. To comply with the swarm micro-robotic requirements in which every part should be mass-producible and little sensitive to fabrication tolerance, a wideband planar rectenna using a single layer of metallization has been designed. The rectifier prototype exhibits a maximum efficiency of 37.7% at 90GHz measured at 3dBm input power and a half efficiency bandwidth of 22%.