Analog Integr Circ Sig Process (2011) 66:6166 DOI 10.

1007/s10470-010-9521-5

Design and analysis of a low power passive UHF RFID transponder IC

Li-Ying Chen Lu-Hong Mao Xiao-Zong Huang

Received: 17 August 2009 / Revised: 15 March 2010 / Accepted: 5 August 2010 / Published online: 15 August 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract This paper presents a low power passive UHF RFID transponder IC, which is compatible with ISO/IEC 18000-6B Standard, operating at the 915 MHz ISM band with the total supply current consumption less than 10 lA. The fully integrated passive transponder, whose reading distance more than 3 m at 4 W (36 dBm) EIRP with an antenna gain less than 1.5 dBi, is powered by the received RF energy. There are no external components, except for the antenna. The transponder IC includes matching network, rectier, regulator, power on reset circuit, local oscillator, bandgap reference, AM demodulator, backscatter, control logic and memory. The IC is fabricated using Chartered 0.35 lm two-poly four-metal CMOS process with Schottky diodes and EEPROM supported. The die size is 1.5 mm 9 1.0 mm. Keywords Low power UHF RFID Passive transponder

1 Introduction Radio frequency identication (RFID) is an automatic wireless data collection technology with a long history since the Second World War. Recently, RFID is becoming more and more popular in many applications, such as supply chain management, wireless sensing, access to control buildings, tracking, personal identication and security, etc. Some big corporations have employed the technology, for example the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The increasing applications have required for high volume, low cost, small size and higher data rates. This paper describes a long range, low power, passive UHF RFID transponder IC. Nowadays, RFID technology operates in several different frequency bands, such as low frequency (LF, 125 kHz), high frequency (HF, 13.56 MHz), ultra high frequency (UHF, 860960 MHz) and microwave (2.4 GHz). IF and HF RFID have been widely employed in many years. But their reading range is typically limited to less than 1.2 m. Also, the bandwidth in Europe and other regions is limited by regulations to a few kilohertz [1]. The passive transponders that operate in the UHF and microwave frequency bands allow longer reading distance, higher data rates, and small antenna sizes. The UHF frequency band RFID transponders are becoming a hot spot. In North and South America, the center frequency is 915 MHz, whereas Europe, Middle East, and Russian Federation mainly use 866 MHz. Asia and Australia use frequencies within the band from 866 to 954 MHz. Korea made an allocation in 908 to 914 MHz [1, 2]. This paper presents a low power, fully integrated, passive UHF RFID transponder IC, which is compatible with ISO/IEC 18000-6B Standard, operating at the 915 MHz ISM band. The transponder IC is fabricated by Chartered 0.35 lm two-poly four-metal CMOS process with Schottky

L.-Y. Chen is supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2008AA04A102). L.-Y. Chen (&) L.-H. Mao X.-Z. Huang School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China e-mail: liying_chen@nankai.edu.cn L.-Y. Chen Institute of Microelectronics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300457, China

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diodes and EEPROM supported. The reading distance of the transponder IC is more than 3 m with the total supply current consumption less than 10 lA at 4 W (36 dBm) EIRP base-station transmit power. The transponder architecture and the operation of the different building blocks are described, respectively. The experimental results are presented and a conclusion is provided.

3 Building blocks 3.1 Rectier and regulator Figure 2 shows schematic of the rectier, which converts the incident RF signal to a DC supply voltage for the whole transponder chip. The rectier is basically a cascade of Nstage diode-capacitor peak detector [3, 4], which is also called Dickson charge pump in the context of memory ICs [5]. All diodes and capacitors are identical. The Schottky diodes with low series resistance and low junction capacitance are used, which can achieve a higher power conversion efciency of the received RF input energy to a DC power supply. In AC analysis, all capacitors will appear as short circuit and all the diodes are connected in parallel (or antiparallel) to the RF input signal by the capacitors. In DC analysis, all capacitors are open circuit, and all diodes are connected in series to allow a DC current owing. Thus, the generated voltage is approximately equal to [3] VDC N VRF;in Vd 1 where VRF,in is the amplitude of the RF input signal and Vd is the forward voltage of each Schottky diode. The regulator provides constant supply voltage to the RF AFE circuit and the signal processing unit, as shown in Fig. 3. The regulator prevents the transponder chip from breaking down with the varied amplitude of RF input signal at different locations. The resistors R1 and R2 form a voltage divider. The error amplier compares the voltage V- with the reference voltage V? from the voltage reference circuit. The transistor M1 is used to sink the current according to the output of the error amplier. To achieve the low power circuit, the startup circuit is used, and completely turns off once the voltage reference circuit is started and no dissipation during typical operation state. 3.2 AM demodulator and backscatter The AM demodulator is used to extract the digital data bitstream from the incident input carrier signal. Figure 4 shows a block diagram of the AM demodulator. A fourstage Dickson charge pump is used as the envelope detector to boost up the input signal. The following two low-pass lters are used to average the boosted input signal with large time circuit, which eliminates the carrier noise and power ripple [6, 7]. The output voltages of two lowpass lters are then compared with a gain amplier to generate the output data bitstream. The ASK modulation is achieved by a backscattering approach. The ASK modulator can be regarded as a simple switch that modulates the input impedance of the transponder chip [8, 9]. As shown in Fig. 5, by switching on or off the transistors M1 and M2, the Bi-state amplitude

2 Architecture The block diagram of the proposed UHF RFID transponder is shown in Fig. 1. The antenna is the only external component. The individual building blocks of this diagram are described in details in the following paragraphs. The transponder chip includes the RF analog front end (RF AFE) circuit and the signal processing unit. The RF AFE consists of matching network, rectier, and regulator, power on reset circuit, local oscillator, bandgap reference, AM demodulator, and backscatter. The processing unit includes control logic and memory. The matching network circuit is used to achieve maximum power transfer between the reader, antenna and transponder. The rectier converts the incident RF input signal from the reader to a DC supply voltage. The regulator provides the stable voltage to all analog and digital circuits. The AM demodulator extracts out the digital data bitstream from the received RF signal. The backscatter circuit sends the data back to the reader by alternating the input impedance of the transponder. The low power local oscillator generates the clock signal to the control logic, which is initialized at power-up by the power on reset (POR) circuit. The bandgap reference circuit provides the reference voltage and current to both analog and digital circuits. The POR circuit generates the chip power on reset signal. The control logic disposes of the protocols, such as anticollision, encoding and decoding, cyclic redundancy checks (CRC), commands, etc.

Fig. 1 Block diagram of the transponder chip

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Analog Integr Circ Sig Process (2011) 66:6166 Fig. 2 Schematic of the rectier

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Fig. 3 Schematic of the regulator

Fig. 4 Schematic of the AM demodulator

modulated backscatter is achieved. With the modulation approach, high power conversion efciency for dc supply voltage and high modulated backscattering power for the

backward link are implemented simultaneously. The schematic of the backscatter modulation circuit is shown in Fig. 5.

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parameters. But the bit rate accuracy of the chosen protocol ISO/IEC 18000-6B is less than 15%, which is tolerant to these variations. Therefore, the performance of the digital circuits cannot be affected. 3.4 Control logic The control logic is used to utilize the communication protocols. As shown in Fig. 7, the control logic which is clocked by the low-power local oscillator includes decoder module, encoder module, clock synchronization module, cyclic redundancy checks module, control unit, power management unit, and shift registers, etc. The clock synchronization algorithm is implemented in order to resolve the frequency error and synchronization problem, because the clock signal of the local oscillator slightly varies with the temperature, supply voltage, and process parameters. Because of all commands following by the preamble, which is equivalent to nine bits of Manchester 0 in NRZ format [10], the clock signal of the local oscillator is synchronized with the Rx signal by the preamble. The ISO 18000-6B standard denes the protocol for a UHF passive backscatter RFID system, featuring the capabilities as follows: identication and communication with multiple tags in the eld, selection of a subgroup of tags for identication or communication, reading from and writing to or rewriting data many times to individual tags, user-controlled permanently lockable memory, data integrity protection, interrogator-to-tag communications link with error detection, tag-to-interrogator communications link with error detection [5]. In the version of the prototype tag described below, all of the mandatory commands and a subset of the optional and custom commands dened by the ISO standard have been implemented.

Fig. 5 Schematic of the backscatter circuit

Fig. 6 Block diagram of the local oscillator

3.3 Local oscillator Figure 6 shows a block diagram of the on-chip local oscillator that generates the clock signal for the digital circuits. It is based on RC relaxation oscillator. The transistors M1 and M4 are the current source and sink. When the output of the local oscillator is low, M3 is on and M2 is off. The capacitor C is charged with the constant current from M4. When the output is high, the capacitor is discharged with the constant current from M1. The local oscillator is sensitive to the variations of the temperature, supply voltage, and process

Fig. 7 Block diagram of the control logic

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Model XCRMF-801 (Invengo IT Co., Ltd., Shenzhen), which is compatible with ISO/IEC 18000-6B Standard. The received power of the transponder versus the time is shown in Fig. 9. As shown in Fig. 9(a), the minimum received power of the transponder is less than -7 dBm. And, the data rate is 80 kbit/s. Figure 9(b) shows the waveform of the GROUP_SELECT_NE command from the reader. With 4 W (36 dBm) EIRP at 915 MHz and the antenna gain less than 1.5 dBi, the reading distance of the transponder is more than 3 m. The performance of the proposed transponder is summarized in Table 1.

Fig. 8 Die photomicrograph of the transponder chip Table 1 Performance summary of the proposed transponder Process 0.35 lm 2P4 M CMOS 860960 MHz \10 lA 7.3-247j@915 MHz [3 m 80 kbit/s 80 kbit/s ASK ISO/IEC 18000-6B 1.5 mm 9 1.0 mm

4 Experimental results The transponder chip is fabricated using Chartered 0.35 lm two-poly four-metal CMOS process with Schottky diodes and EEPROM supported. The die size is 1.5 mm 9 1.0 mm. A die photograph is shown in Fig. 8. The only two bonding wires are required to connect the antenna to the transponder. Figure 9 shows the measured results of the transponder IC chip with Tektronix 3308B real-time spectrum analyzer by the UHF RFID reader of

Carrier frequency Current consumption Tag impedance at 915 MHz Free space reading distance Rx data rate Tx data rate Modulation format Commands supported Die size

Fig. 9 Measured waveforms of the transponder chip

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Analog Integr Circ Sig Process (2011) 66:6166 10. ISO/IEC 18000: Information technology automatic identication and data capture techniquesRadio frequency identication for item management air interface. http://www.iso.org.

5 Conclusion This paper presents a low power, fully integrated, passive UHF RFID transponder IC, which is compatible with ISO/ IEC 18000-6B Standard, operating at the 915 MHz ISM band with the total supply current consumption less than 10 lA. Theoretical analyses and circuit simulations used for the design optimization have been proposed. The transponder chip has been fabricated by Chartered 0.35 lm two-poly four-metal CMOS process with Schottky diodes and EEPROM supported. The free space reading distance of the transponder IC is more than 3 m with 4 W (36 dBm) EIRP base-station transmit power and the antenna gain less than 1.5 dBi. The measurement result meets the specication of the proposed system.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Xuan Zheng and Liyuan Ma for their help in the process of design and measurements.

Li-Ying Chen received his Ph.D. degrees in microelectronics from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2008. He is a lecturer in Nankai University now. His current research interests are UHF RFID transponder ICs, low-noise phase-locked loops, and RF front-ends for wireless communications

References
1. Finkenzeller, K. (2003). RFID handbook (2nd ed.). New York, USA: Wiley. 2. EPC Regulatory status for using RFID in the UHF spectrum 20. http://www.epcglobalcanada.org. 3. Karthaus, U., & Fischer, M. (2003). Fully integrated passive UHF RFID transponder IC with 16.7 uW minimum RF input power. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 38(10), 16021608. 4. Vita, G. D., & Iannaccone, G. (2005). Design criteria for the RF section of UHF and microwave passive RFID transponder. IEEE Transaction on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 53(9), 29782990. 5. Tran, N., Lee, B., & Lee, J. W. (2007). Development of longrange UHF-band RFID Tag chip using Schottky diodes in standard CMOS technology. IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, pp. 281284. 6. Yu, H., & Naja, K. (2003). Low-power interface circuits for bioimplantable microsystems. IEEE International Solid-state circuits conference digital technology papers, pp. 194487. 7. Rongsawat, K., & Thanachayanont, A. (2006). Ultra low power analog front-end for UHF RFID transponder. International Symposium on Communications and Information, pp. 11951198. 8. Fuschini, F., Piersani, C., Paolazzi, F., & Falciasecca, G. (2008). Analytical approach to the backscatter from UHF RFID transponder. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 7, 3335. 9. Ashry, A., & Sharaf, K. (2007). Ultra low power UHF RFID tag 0.13 lm CMOS. International Conference on Microelectronics, pp. 283286.

Lu-Hong Mao received his Ph.D. degrees in microelectronics from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2000. He is a professor in Tianjin University. His current research interests are UHF RFID transponder ICs, optoelectronic integrated receiver, and RF front-ends for wireless communications.

Xiao-Zong Huang received his B.S. degrees in microelectronics from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2007. He is currently working toward the M.S. degree in microelectronics in Tianjin University. His current research interests are UHF RFID transponder ICs.

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