IEEE RFID-TA 2026
An Adaptive Hybrid Charge Pump for Efficient Energy Harvesting in UHF RFID Systems
Rohit Kesharwani, Andre Jäger, Martin Grabmann, David Schreiber, Georg Gläser, and Eric Schäfer
Abstract:
In passive UHF RFID systems, the instantaneous available power is insufficient to directly operate power intensive components such as sensors and microcontrollers. Therefore, energy must be harvested and accumulated over time, enabling short bursts of operation for sensing and data transmission.
Conventional rectifier based harvesters suffer from leakage and efficiency limitations, while existing charge pump solutions assume sufficient input energy and exhibit performance degradation due to increased stage count and switching losses. This motivates efficient energy harvesting solution for energyconstrained RFID sensor nodes.
This paper presents a hybrid charge pump architecture for passive RFID sensor systems. Fibonacci and multiphase voltage doubler (MPVD) topologies are analyzed in terms of output impedance, gain, and efficiency characteristics. Based on this, a configurable hybrid architecture is proposed to maximize efficiency across the output voltage range. The gain stages are adaptively controlled with output voltage to improve energy transfer efficiency and reduce charging time of off-chip storage capacitor.
The measurements show approximately 50% reduction in charging time of off-chip storage capacitor compared to a fixed-gain implementation, with a peak efficiency of 80%. The proposed architecture is validated in a commercially available 180-nm CMOS technology and operates from a 1.2 V supply, making it well suited for battery-free sensing and IoT applications
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Integrated Circuits
We offer the design and realisation of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) in CMOS, BiCMOS and SOI technologies. We achieve well-performing ASICs with our first runs (first-time right silicon).
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Integrated sensor systems
Here we investigate miniaturised systems manufactured in semiconductor technology consisting of microelectronic components for sensors applications, as well as methods to design these highly complex systems efficiently and safely.
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RFID sensor technology
We are researching energy-efficient solutions for RFID sensor technology in order to open up new applications and, for example, to make processes in industry more resource-efficient.
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ULP sensor systems
We research and develop ultra-low-power (ULP) sensor systems that require very little power and have integrated energy management components. Our goal is to use them to open up new applications for the Internet of Things.
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