882

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008

Compact Circularly Polarized Rectenna

With Unbalanced Circular Slots
Tzong-Chee Yo, Chien-Ming Lee, Chen-Ming Hsu, and Ching-Hsing Luo, Member, IEEE

AbstractA novel rectifying antenna (rectenna) using a compact circularly polarized (CP) patch antenna with RF-to-DC power
conversion part at 2.45 GHz is introduced, in which the unbalanced slots structure is adopted for size reduction and 2nd harmonic rejection. To contribute a rectenna for RF power conversion,
the back side of the CP antenna is the doubler rectifier circuit with
3rd order harmonic rejection radial stub for efficiency optimization and harmonic power re-radiation elimination. The adopted
CP antenna built on low cost FR-4 substrate has measured bandwidth of 137 MHz (10 dB return loss) as well as 30 MHz CP bandwidth (3 dB axial ratio). By up to 3rd order harmonic rejection, the
RF-to-DC conversion efficiency would reach 53% and 75% with
1 K resistor load under ANSI/IEEE uncontrolled and controlled
RF human exposure limit respectively.

Index TermsCircular polarization, patch antenna, rectifiers,

rectifying antenna (rectenna), wireless power transmission (WPT).

I. INTRODUCTION

ECTIFYING antenna (rectenna) which can convert RF energy to DC power plays an important role in free space
wireless power transmission (WPT). Over the last century, the
development of rectenna for space solar power transmission
(SSPT) [1] as well as WPT [2] had great achievement with specific functions; and the applications e.g., actuator [3] or wireless
sensors [4] were also applied with WPT techniques. It shows
that the WPT techniques using rectennas have great potential to
deliver energy to load through free space without using physical
transmission line.
The typical rectenna in the prior literatures [1][4] basically
consists of four elements: antenna, low pass filter (LPF), diodes,
and DC pass capacitor. The initial development of rectenna focuses on its directivity and efficiency for great power reception
and conversion, hence, large array [5] was usually adopted for
microwave power reception. Afterward, many functions were
added to enhance the performance of the rectenna array, such
as arbitrary polarization [6], dual-polarization [7], CP [8], dual
band [9] and wide band [10] operation. Besides, for the antenna
integrated with nonlinear circuits, such as diodes and FETs, it is
well known that harmonics of the fundamental frequency would
Manuscript received May 2, 2007; revised September 10, 2007. This work
was supported by the Ministry of Education (Ex: HH94-A13) and Excellence
University project of National Cheng-Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan,
R.O.C.
T.-C. Yo, C.-M. Lee, and C.-H. Luo are with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail:
robin@ee.ncku.edu.tw).
C.-M. Hsu was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National
Cheng-Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C. He is now with Lite-Med,
Inc., Taiwan, R.O.C.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2008.916956

be generated. The unwanted harmonics cause problems of harmonics re-radiation and efficiency reduction of rectenna; then
the LPF is required to suppress harmonics to improve system
performance and prevent harmonics interference. For size reduction and cost down, the antenna with harmonic rejection
property was proposed to eliminate LPF [11]. In addition, for
satellite power transmission as well as portable application, CP
has more fade resistant than linear polarization (LP) and low
polarization loss between transmitting and receiving antennas
without regarding its rotating angle. The combination of harmonic rejection and CP property would bring the advantages of
low polarization loss, conversion efficiency enhancement and
simpler design.
In this paper, a compact circularly polarized rectenna with
harmonic rejection property is proposed. The unbalanced
slots on the circular patch antenna achieve CP operation, size
reduction and the second harmonic rejection property so that
only third harmonic rejection stub is necessary omitting the requirement of LPF and bringing the benefit of low insertion loss
at fundamental frequency associated with LPF in conventional
rectennas. Furthermore, the CP operation is excited by single
feed avoiding complex branch coupler feeding. The doubler
rectifier with small third harmonic rejection stub placed on the
back side of rectenna provides high output voltage as well as
great RF-to-DC conversion efficiency.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN
The geometry along with its parameters of the CP patch
rectenna with two unbalanced circular slots is shown in Fig. 1.
The slotted CP antenna has the advantages of compact size,
circularly polarized characteristic, and second harmonic rejection property and the design procedure is discussed in next two
paragraphs. When integrating circuits with antenna, the transmission line feed would cause complicated layout schematic
for antenna array application. Besides, the nearby circuit would
introduce coupling effects and affect antenna characteristics.
Placing circuit on the back side of the antenna through coaxial
feed can bring the benefits of low transmission line loss and less
occupied rectenna area to decrease the mentioned problems.
The optimal antenna element parameters were obtained by
using the Ansoft simulation software: High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) [12]. The circular patch antenna and rectifying circuit are designed at the center frequency of 2.45 GHz
on low cost FR-4 substrate. The two layer structures are of the
mm and
mm,
same material with a thickness
and the conductor thickness of
a dielectric constant
36 m (equivalent of 1-oz copper). Both the antenna feed and
rectifier input port have characteristic impedance of 50 for

0018-926X/$25.00 2008 IEEE

YO et al.: COMPACT CP RECTENNA WITH UNBALANCED CIRCULAR SLOTS

883

Fig. 1. Antenna and rectifying circuit configuration and the photographs of

proposed rectenna. Geometry parameters for the CP antenna are: W = 60; L =

60; R = 15:5; F = 6:5; d = 5:2; r = 5:2; d = 8:3; r = 2:3; h =

1:6; h = 0:8 (Dimension: mm).

good impedance matching to reduce signal reflection between

these components.
The unbalance slots are placed on the diameter line, which
has 45 counterclockwise rotation of the vertical diameter of circular patch, with different size and position relative to the center
of circular patch is
of the circular disk. Initially, the radius
15.5 mm which has resonant frequency of 2.6 GHz without embedding slots. To achieve the operation frequency range from
mm with
2.42.6 GHz, the slots are loaded at
mm initially and two resonant modes
the radii
with linear polarization are excited. The effects of slot size
and position
as representative of slots size and position
are plotted in Fig. 2(a) and (b) in which the size and position
dominate the frequency of low and high resonant mode respectively. The larger slots size decreases the frequency of low resonant mode and the longer distance of slots from patch center
increases the frequency of high resonant mode. By the analysis,
the parameters of the slots were designed accordingly to excite
orthogonal modes with quadrature out of phase as CP operation.
Besides, the unbalanced slots also introduce the shift of second
harmonic of fundamental band and will be discussed in the next
section.
The antenna shown in Fig. 1 provides left-handed CP.
Right-handed CP can be obtained by placing the slots mirror
to x-axis. Fig. 3 shows good agreement between the measured
and simulated return loss. The measured 10 dB return loss at
fundamental frequency of 2.45 GHz extended from 2397 to
MHz) shown in Fig. 3. It has measured
2534 MHz (
minimum axial ratio (AR) of 1.5 dB with 3 dB AR bandwidth
of 30 MHz as well as radiation pattern at 2455 MHz and plotted
in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 separately. The CP antenna measured by
LP horn antenna in anechoic chamber has 2dBi LP gain at its
corresponding to 3.36 dBic CP
broadside
dB), the slots size
gain. For perfect CP operation (i.e.,
and position can be tuned further for larger CP gain.
In addition to CP operation, the slots also increase the current path of radiation patch which equivalent to smaller antenna
size at the same frequency. By introducing slots in the LP circular microstrip disk antenna at 2.45 GHz, the antenna radius

Fig. 2. Computed return loss versus frequency for the parameter of (a) r : 3.5,
4, 4.5 mm and (b) d : 5.8, 7, 8.2 mm.

Fig. 3. Simulation and measurement result of return loss from 2 to 3 GHz.

is reduced from the calculated result of 16.5 mm from [13] to

15.5 mm of the proposed one, yielding 12% size reduction.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008

Fig. 4. Computed and measured axial ratio (AR).

Fig. 6. Measured (with and without 3rd harmonic rejection stub) return loss of
the proposed CP antenna.

Fig. 7. Schematic and photograph of doubler rectifier with 3rd harmonic rejection radial stub.

Fig. 5. Measured radiation pattern (at 2455 MHz) of proposed CP antenna

(a) x-z plane (b) y-z plane.

III. RECTIFIER DESIGN

A typical rectenna usually consists of a power receiving antenna, a low-pass filter or band-pass filter to suppress harmonic
signals, diodes for RF-to-DC conversion, a DC pass filter capacitor, and a resistive load. The diode plays the key role in
determining the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency. HSMS-282c
Schottky detector diode pair is adopted here for rectenna design. The equivalent circuit of a single diode consists of
V are derived
from its datasheet [14]. Since the proposed antenna just provides second harmonic rejection property shown in Fig. 6 (dash
line), a 3rd harmonic rejection radial stub is added between antenna and rectifying circuit for efficiency improvement. The design and layout of the 3rd harmonic rejection radial stub [15]

is optimized by Ansoft Designer shown in dashed square of

Fig. 7 while its center rejection frequency is at 7.35 GHz (3rd
harmonic of 2.45 GHz) and has wide rejection band covering
3rd harmonic frequency range (7.27.45 GHz) of fundamental
band (2.42.483 GHz). After that, the input return loss of the
proposed antenna integrated with 3rd harmonic rejection stub
is verified in Fig. 6 (solid line). The measured second and third
harmonic return losses of the proposed CP antenna with radial
stub are 0.92 dB and 0.58 dB, respectively. It is clearly shown
that the 3rd order harmonic return loss is largely reduced from
dB to
dB at 7.35 GHz in Fig. 6 (dash line to solid
line).
The proposed CP antenna with the integrated radial stub
has 50 input impedance for easy measurement. Impedance
matching network for the rectifier also has been added for
better matching. The schematic and photograph of the adopted
rectifier, which is voltage doubler for at least twice output
DC voltage and half input impedance of the single diode
rectifier, are shown in Fig. 7. The double output voltage is
during
created by storing charge at the series capacitor
the negative phase of RF signal through the shunt diode while
is accumulated with the input potential during
charge in
the positive signal phase by turning on the series diode. The
impedance matching network has one transmission line-Line1
mm and
mm as well as 4.7 pF series
with
connected capacitor-C between the 3rd harmonic rejection

YO et al.: COMPACT CP RECTENNA WITH UNBALANCED CIRCULAR SLOTS

Fig. 8. Measured output voltage and conversion efficiency of the proposed

rectenna as a function of load resistance at 20 dBm.

stub and doubler rectifier for 50

characteristic impedance.
By the 2nd harmonics rejection CP antenna and 3rd harmonic
rejection stub, the harmonics generated by the non-linear
diodes can be largely suppressed for efficiency improvement
and eliminating interference to other communication system. It
should be noted that high output dc voltage generated by the
doubler is able to decrease the diodes junction capacitance to
further improve the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency [16]. The
unwanted RF signals leaking to load are also suppressed by the
dc pass filter-C which is parallel connected with the load.
IV. RESULT
In order to minimize the junction capacitance of diodes for efficiency improvement, the output voltage corresponding to the
specified input power (20 dBm) is maximized. Therefore, the
output load resistor is chosen to maximize the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency of the adopted Schottky barrier diodes. Due
to the trade off between output DC voltage and RF-to-DC conversion efficiency, the 1K resistor load is selected as the load
value for conversion efficiency optimization. Here, the output
DC voltage across the resistor load was measured by voltmeter.
By load resistance and output voltage, the corresponding output
DC power is obtained. The RF-to-DC conversion efficiency
is defined as
%

(1)

is the output DC power,

is the power reWhere
is output DC voltage and
is the
ceived by the rectifier,
load resistance. In specific input power (20 dBm), the output
DC voltage as a function of resistance is depicted in Fig. 8
showing that the larger the resistance, the higher the output DC
voltage. By (1), the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency represented
as a function of resistance is also plotted in Fig. 8, which indicates the optimum conversion efficiency 70.6% just located at
.
1K
For further investigation of rectenna characteristic corresponding to the transmitting and receiving antennas distance
variation, the output DC voltage and RF-to-DC conversion
efficiency is measured as the function of power density. The

885

Fig. 9. Measured output voltage and efficiency of the proposed rectenna as a

function of incident power density with 1 K
load resistance.

power density is presented as the ratio of incident power on

antenna and the equivalent antenna area [17]. From Fig. 8, load
resistance chosen for the rectenna test as a function of power
density is 1 K . The measured output voltage and conversion
efficiency of the rectenna are plotted in Fig. 9. In the measured
power density range, the optimum RF-to-DC conversion efficiency is 78% at 16.5 mW/cm power density as well as 15.3 V
output DC potential with 1 K load resistance. Since the WPT
technique may be applicable on wireless sensors near or on
human body, the corresponding ANSI/IEEE [18] RF human
exposure limits for uncontrolled and controlled environment at
2.45 GHz are 1.63 mW/cm and 8.16 mW/cm , yielding good
RF-to-DC conversion efficiency, 53% and 75%, respectively.
From the measured result in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9, the rectenna
using CP antenna with 2nd harmonic rejection property and 3rd
harmonic rejection radial stub has great performance in output
DC voltage and RF-to-DC conversion efficiency.
V. CONCLUSION
A compact circular polarized rectenna with two unbalanced
circular slots and 2nd order harmonic rejection property is proposed. The 2nd order harmonic rejection property originated
from the two unbalanced circular slots simplifies the design
of rectify circuit which only adds 3rd order harmonic rejection radial stub for efficiency improvement. The circular polarized rectenna operated at 2.45 GHz with measured bandwidth
of 137 MHz and minimum 1.5 dB AR. The used doubler rectifier provides optimum output DC voltage of 15.8 V as well
as 78% RF-DC conversion efficiency at 16.5 mW/cm incident
power density and 1 K load resistance. Corresponding to the
RF exposure limit of ANSI/IEEE standard, the rectenna can also
provide good efficiency of 53% and 75% in uncontrolled and
controlled environment respectively. In this study, the proposed
rectenna can not only provide CP characteristic for power receiving with low polarization loss but also have large output
DC voltage that achieves great RF-to-DC conversion efficiency.
The circular slots structure and double layer configuration make
the rectenna much small (12% of size reduction) and compact
(2.4 mm in thickness).

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 3, MARCH 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge basic support from the
Center for Micro/Nano Science and Technology and the Center
of Bioscience and Biotechnology, National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan, R.O.C.
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[18] IEEE Standards Coordinating Committee 28, Standard for Safety

Levels With Respect to Human Exposure to Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields 3 kHz to 300 GHz. New York: IEEE, 1999.
Tzong-Chee Yo received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung
University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 2001 and
2003, respectively, where he is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree.
His research interests include RF circuits and
devices, microstrip antenna, rectenna, and wireless
charging system.

Chien-Ming Lee was born in Taichung, Taiwan,

R.O.C., in 1982. He received the B.S. degree
in aeronautical engineering from the National
Formosa University, Yunlin, Taiwan, in 2004. He
is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at
National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan,
R.O.C.
His main research interests are in planar
antennas for wireless communications, especially for the planar antennas for implantable
biotelemetry, mobile phone, WLAN, and UWB
applications, and also in microwave passive components and RF circuit
design.

Chen-Ming Hsu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.,

in 1979. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from National Cheng
Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, in 2001, 2003, and
2007, respectively.
He is now an Engineer at Lite-Med Inc., Taipei. His
research field includes RF IC, biomedical signal processing circuit, instrument design and biotelemetry
chip design.

Ching-Hsing Luo received the B.S. degree in

electrophysics from National Chaio Tung University,
Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C., the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University,
in 1982, the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering
from The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
MD, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in biomedical
engineering from Case Western Reserve University,
Cleveland, OH, in 1991.
He is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University,
Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C., since 1996 and was honored as a Distinguished
Professor in 2005. His research interests include biomedical instrumentation-on-a-chip, assistive tool implementation, cell modeling, signal processing,
home automata, RFIC, gene chip, and quality engineering.