TECHNICAL PAPER MEMS based antenna of energy harvester for wireless sensor node Noor Hidayah Mohd Yunus 1,2 • Jahariah Sampe 1 • Jumril Yunas 1 • Alipah Pawi 2 • Zeti Akma Rhazali 3 Received: 12 September 2019 / Accepted: 6 April 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract This paper deals with glass surface micromachined antenna of RF energy harvesting for wireless sensor node applications. The research aims to provide a system based on a new integrated RF energy harvester circuitry using a transparent receiving antenna by micromachining process. The energy harvester system is studied using CST-MWS software by Pyrex glass as the antenna substrate having dielectric constant e r = 4.6. Besides, PSpice and Cadence analyze the DC output solutions. The fabrication of the micromachined antenna based on metal patterning of the radiator patch and metal sputtering on the top and bottom of the glass surface, respectively. The analysis of the wave propagation of the antenna shows good agreement between the simulation solutions and experimental validations. It is present that the antenna achieved a maximum gain of [ 4 dB, reflection coefficient (S 11 ) \ - 10 dB, wide - 10 dB bandwidth of [ 100 MHz, omnidirectional radiation pattern and VSWR ratio \ 2. From DC analysis, with an ultra-low input power of - 20 dBm incoming from this optimal antenna, the MOSFET rectifier reaches an efficiency of 46.23% and DC output voltage of 2.15 V at 1 MX load. Further, the developed antenna integrated into the RF energy harvester on the same circuit platform that yield a highly efficient operating system at 5 GHz ISM band. 1 Introduction A dramatic growth in demand of future wireless devices has been emphasizing with a fully autonomous powered device. However, limited battery life and recharge battery to power wireless devices such as embedded microcontrollers, remote control, Internet of Things (IoT), cell phones and wearable medical sensors have been the major drawbacks for a continuous power sources for the operation (Sampe et al. 2019; Sun et al. 2018; Yunus et al. 2019; Yuan et al. 2019; Zakaria et al. 2014). Increasing durability of the battery is a subject of interest. The issue has encouraged research and development (R&D) for some techniques to capture the energy from ambient sources, such as radio frequency (RF), thermal effect, solar, mechanical vibration and so on in which called energy harvesting (Zeng et al. 2019; Fan et al. 2019). Energy harvesting is a technique or even known as derived energy from external source system and convert the source into electrical power (Yang et al. 2020). Recently, harvesting the ambient energy to empower electronic devices without chemical battery has grown momentum. Harvesting of energy could facilitate innovative ‘green’ electronic devi- ces owing to autonomous and self-powered sensor devices. The vast omnipresent over numerous frequency bands and the usefulness in wireless RF communication devices, electromagnetic RF energy introduced as the source for energy harvesting. In fact, RF energy sources are free and unlimited energy present in surrounding. RF energy har- vesting is the system that designed to supply an alternative harvested RF energy source for energizing electronics devices. Since a tiny amount of RF energy resources & Jahariah Sampe jahariah@ukm.edu.my Noor Hidayah Mohd Yunus noorhidayahm@unikl.edu.my Jumril Yunas jumrilyunas@ukm.edu.my Alipah Pawi alipah@unikl.edu.my Zeti Akma Rhazali zetiakma@uniten.edu.my 1 Institute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics-Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (IMEN-UKM), 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia 2 Communication Technology Section, Universiti Kuala Lumpur-British Malaysian Institute (UniKL-BMI), Batu 8, Jalan Sungai Pusu, 53100 Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia 3 Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Jalan Uniten-Ikram, 43900 Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia 123 Microsystem Technologies https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-020-04842-5