PhD Defense of Mohamad AWAD

Energy harvesting is a promising research theme which analyzes a wide range of sources for the application. These sources can be mechanical, thermal or electromagnetic, etc.
Hereby, the work presented explores technical solutions for ambient electromagnetic energy harvesting. Electromagnetic energy is capable of partly or completely supplying energy to low-power wireless communication systems. Many interesting applications are feasible, such as, wireless sensor networks (WSN) ensuring IoT (Internet-of-Things), in the medical field, security, by using equipments containing an antenna. However, the antenna is a voluminous passive component which is utilized merely for a fraction of the time, i.e., just for communications. The underlying idea of RF energy harvesting is to use the antenna to harvest the ambient electromagnetic energy, despite the low power recovered. Associated with the antenna, the RF energy harvesting is based on implementing diodes in rectifiers. In this manuscript, integrated diodes from modern technology: FD-SOI 28 nm are studied.
In this work, three run for RF energy harvesting are designed. Two of them are realized in FD-SOI technology. One and two stage Dickson rectifiers for RF energy harvesting using FD-SOI are designed, characterized, measured and compared to RF-DC converters made with 55nm BiCMOS technology. These rectifiers are state-of-the-art in terms of the power conversion efficiency for a given power of the order of -20 dBm. Furthermore, FD-SOI technology offers a new degree of freedom with the back gate polarization (BG). This polarization of the BG makes it viable to change the parameters of the non-linear elements at the base of the conversion. Moreover, an investigation of integrated Schottky diodes using FDSOI 28 nm is presented. At the end of these experiments, a method of optimizing of the design of these Dickson converters based on simplified specifications is proposed.