Design of a radio frequency energy harvesting circuit with an incorporated solar cell

This work presents a radio frequency energy harvesting circuit designed to harvest RF energy at 2.45GHz with the help of an incorporated solar cell. The levels of RF energy targeted are between -30dBm and -20dBm. The off the shelf solar cell of this work is the dye sensitized solar cell from 3gsolar that can provide a constant voltage of 500mV for indoor condition operations (between 50lux and 500lux). The simulated power harvesting efficiency (PHE), RF + solar, can reach 43% for -30dBm of RF input power at 500lux of irradiance and 38.3% at 50lux for the same level of RF input power.