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aren’t technologies that capture energy with great efficiency. But these technologies do provide the
amount of energy needed for low-power devices that can operate autonomously.

Another advantage of this type of technology is that, unlike the production of large-scale power, we
can consider that the energy source is free if you take into account the electromagnetic energy of
transmitting mobile stations and radio and TV broadcasting antennas.

The use of batteries has two disadvantages: the lifetime of the batteries is very limited even for low-
power batteries, requiring impractical periodical battery replacement, the use of commercial batteries
usually overkills the power requirements for uW sensor nodes, adding size and weight while creating
the problem of environmental pollution due to the deposition of these batteries, as well as increases
significantly the cost overhead of disposable nodes.

This work focuses on incident low-power density; designing, measuring and testing a Rectenna to
harvest electric energy from the RF signals that have been radiated by public communications systems
(GSM-900 and GSM-1800) and the 2.4 GHz ISM band; also the work is motivated by two types of
applications: powering low-power sensor networks and RF energy recycling

1.1 Overview

In this thesis, the work involves the design, simulation, fabrication and measurement of each of the
components of a rectenna (rectifying antenna circuit) has been divided into the following chapters.

 Chapter 1 is this overview.

 Chapter 2 reviews some of the history of microwave power transmission from its beginnings with
the empirical work of Hertz, to Tesla's experiments and describing the evolution of power
transmission in free space. Subsequently, it describes how the approaches of some projects, together
with studies funded by various companies, encourage the evolution of technologies in the field of
microwave power transmission. After the history, an overview of some low power sources for energy
harvesting is shown, then we emphasize in the RF-EM energy harvesting and a feasibility study for
our application is shown.

 Chapter 3 first describes the main parameters of an antenna for its design. A brief background about
UWB antennas and microstrip antennas is introduced. The introduction of the design software (Ansoft
HFSS 11) and a brief description of the