A Novel Compact Folded Dipole Architecture for 2.

45 GHz Rectenna
Application
Fang Zhang #1, Hee Nam #2, and Jong-Chul Lee #3
#
Department of Wireless Communications Engineering, Kwangwoon University
447-1 Wolgye-dong, Nowon-ku, Seoul 139-701, Korea
1
sensen@kw.ac.kr
2
nhspartan@kw.ac.kr
3
jclee@kw.ac.kr
Abstract — A compact folded dipole architecture and a of the rectenna system. Moreover, the RF short chip capacitor
related system design method for 2.45 GHz rectenna application is embedded in the folded dipole, which further minimizes
is presented. It is shown that using this folded dipole structure, the total size of the rectenna system. Meanwhile, the design
the traditional rectenna system design can be almost simplified
to only a required antenna design. Simultaneously, the design of the whole rectenna system can be simplified to a design of
cycle time will be much reduced. In addition, the proposed folded dipole antenna loaded by a diode with chip capacitor.
architecture is uni-planar, robust, and compact, which lead to an In other words, the proposed architecture passes on the
easy design and realization at the required frequency ranges complexity of the system design to the antenna design. The
with a very low cost. The proposed 2.45 GHz rectenna system is proposed compact rectenna is fabricated on a Teflon substrate.
designed and measured for its microwave performances.
The total rectenna is uni-planar structure without ground
Index Terms — Rectenna, folded dipole architecture, wireless
power transmission, uni-planar, rectifier. plane, which is much easier to attach to the application
environment. This proposed folded dipole rectenna yields a
maximum RF-to-DC conversion efficiency of 70.2% at 2.45
I. INTRODUCTION GHz with a load resistance of 100 ohm. Almost all of the
The rectenna is an RF power receiver which can convert rectenna components are integrated into the folded dipole
RF energy to DC power. It plays an important role in free antenna, so the total size is only 54 × 20 mm2, which is the
space wireless power transmission (WPT) [1]-[2]. Recently, relatively small one in all of the ever reported 2.45 GHz
the compact rectenna has gained great attention in many of rectenna system.
the sensor applications, which were also applied with WPT In section 2, the system design method with the proposed
techniques [3]-[4]. It shows that the WPT techniques using simply folded dipole rectenna is presented. Section 3
rectennas can extend the coverage range beyond what describes the design of the 2.45 GHz rectenna system.
transmission lines can reach. Section 4 shows the measurement results of the fabricated
The classic rectenna design in the previous literatures [1]- rectenna. In addition, the measurement results are compared
[4] basically consists of four elements: antenna, low pass with those reported literatures. Due to the particularity of the
filter (LPF), diodes, and RF short chip capacitor, which is architecture, a discussion part is added to Section 5. Finally,
shown in Fig. 1(a). Load resistor is used to calculate the section 6 draws the conclusions.
output power. An antenna plays an important role in rectenna
design. Several kinds of antennas have been used in rectenna
such as dipole antenna [5]-[6], loop antenna [7], microstrip
patch antenna [8], circular-sector antenna [1], and finite
ground coplanar waveguide-fed patch antenna [9]. Besides,
not only Schottky diodes but also GaAs FET [10] and HEMT
[11] are applied to rectennas.
In order to reduce the total rectenna size, compact size
antennas and a multilayer structure is used [2], but it will
increase the design efforts and cost. Rectenna system design
is not simple. From the simulation point of view, most of the
design work need system-level EM simulation to guarantee
the performance requirements [12], and these cause to
increase the design cycle time. In this paper, a novel compact
(a) (b)
folded dipole architecture is firstly presented, which is shown Fig. 1. The classic rectenna using dipole and the proposed
in Fig. 1 (b). The direct connection of the rectifying diode rectenna using folded dipole.
and the folded dipole is used in the proposed rectenna design, (a) Classic rectenna architecture.
which saves the matching network and thus reduces the size (b) Simple folded dipole architecture.

978-1-4244-2802-1/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE 2766

 II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE ANALYSIS
The selection of antenna plays a very important role in
rectenna system architecture. For example, the patch antenna
often causes to multilayer system architecture; dipole antenna
often causes to uni-planar system architecture; CBCPW
antenna causes to one layer system architecture. From the
cost and environment friendly points of view, the uni-planar
dipole antenna is the best candidate. However, the
conventional dipole rectenna architecture often cannot reach
a compact size.
Recently, a wideband planar folded dipole antenna with
self-balanced impedance is studied. About 50% bandwidth is
reported at 1.7 GHz. In the operating band, the gains of the
antenna are almost constant (2 dBi) and the radiation patterns Fig. 2. Geometry of the proposed folded dipole rectenna.
are very similar to those of a normal dipole antenna. Another
important feature of this kind of antenna is large impedance
tuning capability. In this paper, this wideband folded dipole
antenna is modified to build the proposed rectenna. As shown
in Fig. 2, the diode is located in the middle of the bottom side
of the folded dipole. RF short chip capacitor is inserted in the
upside of the folded dipole. Coplanar strip line is used for
connecting to load resistor for power measurement. When the
RF energy transfers to the rectenna, benefiting from the RF
short chip capacitor, the RF signal is received by the diode-
loaded wideband folded dipole without the upper coplanar
strip line and load resistor. The diode rectifies the RF energy
received from the antenna directly. From DC point of view,
the RF short chip capacitor forbids the DC signal to pass
through it, and thus the received RF energy would be
delivered to the load resistor. Impedance matching is very
important for the system efficiency. Thanks to the
impedance-tuning potential of such wideband folded dipole,
the conjugate matching design between the antenna and diode
Fig. 3. Simulation setup of the proposed rectenna system.
by tuning the structure of the folded dipole is possible. Based
on the study [13], we can adjust 4 parameters tagged in Fig. 2,
w1, w2, d, and e to tune the impedance of the folded dipole.
First of all, suitable values of w1, d, and e based on the
fabrication technique can be selected and then w2 can be
tuned to make the conjugate matching between the antenna
and diode. This is not a hard work for the modern RF
simulator, and is also widely used in the RFID system design
[14]. Finally, the rectenna system design is simplified to a
complex impedance loaded antenna design. There are several
advantages we can expect from this proposed simple
architecture. No diode matching network is needed in this
architecture, and thus the components can be saved. Also, the
improved efficiency can be obtained theoretically. Compared
with the conventional rectenna system design, the design
complexity is decreased and design time is much saved for
this proposed architecture. To guarantee this simple
architecture, a proposed 2.45 GHz rectenna is designed and
fabricated. A 1.8 pF chip capacitor is used for this 2.45 GHz
operation. A Schottky diode (HSMS-8101) is used as a
rectifying device. The full-wave electromagnetic simulator
Fig. 4. Impedance at matching point.
IE3D is used for the system design and final optimization.

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 III. RECTENNA DESIGN

A. Diode Impedance Study

In this design, the large signal model of HSMS-8101
Schottky diode is used. The received power of -2 dBm is
chosen for calculating the conjugate matching impedance of
the diode. Agilent Advanced Design system 2008 is used in
this step, and the simulation setup is shown in Fig. 3. The
perfect conjugate matching value is obtained from the
optimization as shown in Fig. 4. From this process, the diode
impedance is 53.008 + j270.240, and the port impedance is
53.008 - j270.240.
B. Folded Dipole Rectenna Design and Simulation
A 2.45 GHz rectenna is designed and fabricated on the
0.54-mm-thick Teflon substrate (dielectric constant = 2.54)
Fig. 7. Radiation pattern of the rectenna.
with 0.018-mm copper cladding. 100 ohm load resistor is
chosen in the design. Based on the study [13], in the Fig. 2,
the value of w2 is related with antenna impedance. To reach IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
the required antenna input impedance, the value of w2 and
The photography of the fabricated 2.45 GHz rectenna is
the length of the dipole are optimized. The final optimized
shown in Fig. 8. The measurement setup and conversion
value is shown in the Fig. 2. The antenna gain, return loss,
efficiency calculation is followed by the study [6]. The
and radiation pattern are shown in Fig. 5, 6, 7, respectively.
measurement distance is set as 3.2 m. To calculate the system
From Fig. 5, antenna gain of 2.3 dBi is obtained from the
efficiency, the proposed folded dipole antenna gain is needed.
simulation result. Second harmonic is very small, which can
However, the proposed folded dipole antenna is not designed
be seen in Fig.6. The radiation pattern of the rectenna is
based on 50 ohm because it is hard to measure the proposed
shown in Fig. 7, which is very similar to those of a normal
antenna gain accurately in that situation. To calculate the
dipole antenna.
Fundamental Second
conversion efficiency, the simulated gain is used. We firstly
studied and simulated the work [13] to make sure the
0
simulation setup is right. The wideband characteristics of the
designed rectenna make the calculation more reliable, since
-10
the simulated results show almost constant gain from 2.3
GHz to 2.6 GHz. Finally, the gain of 2.245 dBi is used for the
Return Loss (dB)

-20
designed folded dipole rectenna. It should be pointed out that
-30
in conventional calculation of the rectenna conversion
efficiency; the antenna with filter network is needed for the
-40
design and measurement without considering the load and
diode. Since the proposed rectenna gain is simulated
-50
including all the system components, it is a more systematic
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Frequency (GHz)
design method and very suitable for the first-pass system
success. Table I shows the measured output voltage and the
Fig. 5. Gain of the rectenna. calculated conversion efficiency with three different load
resistor values. Table I shows this work with some previous
works.

Fig. 8. Photography of the fabricated 2.45 GHz rectenna.

Fig. 6. Return loss of the designed rectenna.

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totally passive low cost RFID design.

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