UCLA

A near-field power transfer equation for an inductively coupled near-field system is derived based on the equivalent circuit model of the coupled resonant loops. Experimental results show that the proposed near-field coupling equation is trustworthy as it correctly predicts the transferred power versus distance relationship for different values of loaded quality factors at the transmitter and the receiver.

Capacity performance of near-field communication (NFC) links is analyzed for noise limited and interference limited scenarios based on information theory. The analytical results provide guidelines for design of inductively coupled antenna systems as the power and capacity budget of the link is carried out. Examples of inductively coupled VLF NFC links are evaluated for different operating scenarios, demonstrating the efficacy and importance of the proposed near-field link budget.

However, in a conventional setup of inductively coupled NFC link, the power coupled through and the bandwidth must be traded off. Direct Antenna Modulation (DAM) is a feasible scheme to break this dilemma. With DAM utilized in NFC link, the power and bandwidth product limit in a high Q system can be circumvented because the non-linear/time-varying nature of the operation allows high speed modulations decoupled from the charging and discharging process of the high-Q resonator. In this work, the theory of NFC link with DAM on the transmitter is presented and validated with an experimental setup. Improvement in reception of the high-speed modulation information is observed in the experiment, implying that a superior capacity performance of a NFC link is achieved through DAM versus the traditional scheme.

The resonant coupling efficiency is limited by the product of the quality factors Q, of the transmitter and receiver and the coupling coefficient k. We observe that in order to achieve maximum efficiency, the ratio of the load-to-loss impedances at both the source and load should be equal to a prescribed value. This is the same condition that yields simultaneous impedance matching at source and load. The efficiency limit is then calculated for single transmitter and two uncoupled receivers. In that case, optimal efficiency is obtained when the load-to-loss impedance ratio is equal to the same prescribed value for all devices simultaneously. However, this condition does not provide for simultaneous matching at the source and loads, which turns out to be impossible. The analysis is then generalized for a single transmitter and N uncoupled receivers and we find that as the number of receivers increases, the total efficiency limit also increases. Finally, we present the efficiency limits and optimal conditions for a system consisting of single and multiple repeaters between transmitter and receiver, which have been shown previously to relay power to larger distances.