Reducing the Impact of Reverse Currents in Tunnel FET Rectifiers for Energy Harvesting Applications

RF to DC passive rectifiers can benefit from the superior performance at low voltage of tunnel transistors. They have shown higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) at low input power than Si FinFETs counterparts. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of typical TFET rectifier topologies associa...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Núñez, Juan, Avedillo, María J.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/155539
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/155539
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Tunnel transistors
Steep subthreshold slope
Rectifiers
Reverse conduction
Energy harvesting
Descripción
Sumario:RF to DC passive rectifiers can benefit from the superior performance at low voltage of tunnel transistors. They have shown higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) at low input power than Si FinFETs counterparts. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of typical TFET rectifier topologies associated with the forward biasing of their intrinsic diode and show that this can occur at relatively weak input signals depending on the specific characteristic of the used tunnel device. We propose a simple modification in the implementation of the rectifiers to overcome this problem. The impact of our proposal is evaluated on the widely used gate cross-coupled topology. The proposed designs exhibit similar peak PCE and sensitivity but significantly improve PCE for larger input signal amplitude and larger input power