Wirelessly-powered Centimeter-Scale Nanowatt Radios in CMOS

Achieving battery less sensors/wireless transceivers that can sense, compute and communicate enables a wide range of ubiquitous internet-of-things applications. Wireless powering presents a robust, reliable approach for providing energy to such battery-less sensors. In this talk, we will focus on the key technical challenges for achieving wirelessly-powered sensors for representative IoT applications. Potentially, achieving WiFi compatible operation enables such radios to leverage the existing WiFi infrastructure for wireless powering. Following an introduction to far-field wireless powering, we will present architectures and circuits focused on increasing wireless powering range and energy harvesting efficiency, both at the circuit and at the system level. Packaging and sensor size are also critical constraints for such wirelessly-powered radios and we will discuss how constraints on volume and weight impact system and circuit-level design choices. We will discuss performance in the context of state-of-the-art and outline future research to further enable ubiquitous wirelessly-powered sensing and communication.