The Sensor Systems Lab – in the person of EE graduate student Aaron Parks and CSE+EE faculty member Joshua Smith – has won the Best Paper Award at IEEE RFID for the paper Sifting Through the Airwaves: Efficient and Scalable Multiband RF Harvesting.
Previous ambient RF harvesting systems worked for only one pre-selected frequency. The new multi-band harvester can capture power from any subset of a group of pre-selected frequencies. Previous systems would be unlikely to work when moved from one city to another; the new technique enhances mobility. In addition, it allows more power to be captured, since the new harvester can capture power from multiple sources simultaneously.