Low power RF power harvesting enabling more active tag functionality

Abstract

This paper presents the analog part of a production integrated circuit (IC) for EPC Gen2 UHF RFID applications in the 900 MHz band. The tag is unique for its on chip 32 kB non-volatile memory (NVM) I2C functionality and its large reading and writing distance. To achieve these goal a power oriented architectural and block level design approach has been followed. The main considerations concerning energy harvesting and RFID communication are presented in this paper and some specific building blocks are more elaborated like a 2.5% accurate clock reference consuming only 0.3 μA and a 6.25 μs TARI ASK demodulator. The chip is currently in production and is going to be used in aviation for airplane parts logging. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.