A Design of a High-Performance Analog Front-End for Passive UHF RFID Tag EPC C1G2

Abstract

This paper introduces a high-performance analog front end for passive UHF RFID tag compatible with the EPC Class-1 Generation 2 (EPC C1G2) standard protocol. The proposed front end of a passive tag which contains the following modules: a power generation circuit which is composed of a matching circuit and an RF-limiter circuit, an NMOS rectifier, a DC limiter, a voltage regulation, a modulation and ASK demodulation circuit, a power-on-reset circuit, a ring oscillator which generates a clock of 1.28 MHz. The originality of this work is the proposal of a voltage regulation circuit composed of two distinct LDO regulators that share the same reference voltage and are designed to generate a Vdd1 (0.5 V) for the analog supply and Vdd2 (1 V) for digital power supply, under conditions of 50 Ω antenna, 900 MHz, a sensitivity of -24 dBm and a maximum consumption of 1 µW. The operating distance of the RFID is more than 25 meters based on the regulated 4 W effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP). The chip area of the proposed analog front end is only 79 μm × 83 μm. The simulation results in 90 nm CMOS process confirm the performance of the proposed analog front-end.

Keywords