Can you power a circuit with electromagnetic waves, as opposed to a physical connection like with a wire?

 

Can you power a circuit with electromagnetic waves, as opposed to a physical connection like with a wire?

Yes. It's done every time you use an RFID device.

It's also done with many small appliances that use wireless charging via and two-piece transformer.

There are significant inefficiencies and so powering large circuits is generally impractical.

 

Not just circuits my friend, this planet gets turned on every morning from EM waves.

 

One of the pleasant uses of the technology is Contactless Payment Cards

 

Yes. It's done every time you use an RFID device.

It's also done with many small appliances that use wireless charging via and two-piece transformer.

There are significant inefficiencies and so powering large circuits is generally impractical.

The end-to-end efficiency of most remote EM wave power systems is laughable when compared to wired power transfers.
One highly hyped system 'Coda' uses 140W (the original design used 450W) input AC power for the 8W RF beam-forming phased array base transmitter to deliver 1W of power to a remote station 10 feet away.

The technology is cool but as you say, generally impractical.

A cool example of a phased array directing energy to a point in space (water).

 

Yes, there is several ICs in the market that do "RF harvesting"

----> https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/te...sting-rf-to-dc-conversion-powercast-hardware/

One of them ----> https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/power/battery-management/MAX17710.html