A Low-Power and Flexible Energy Detection IR-UWB Receiver for RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents an energy detection Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) receiver for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications. An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) consisting of a 3-5 GHz analog front-end, a timing circuit and a high speed baseband controller is implemented in a 90 nm standard CMOS technology. A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is employed as a reconfigurable back-end, enabling adaptive baseband algorithms and ranging estimations. The proposed architecture is featured by high flexibility that adopts a wide range of pulse rate (512 kHz-33 MHz), processing gain (0-18 dB), correlation schemes, synchronization algorithms, and modulation schemes (PPM/OOK). The receiver prototype was fabricated and measured. The power consumption of the ASIC is 16.3 mW at 1 V power supply, which promises a minimal energy consumption of 0.5 nJ/bit. The whole link is evaluated together with a UWB RFID tag. Bit error rate (BER) measurement displays a sensitivity of -79 dBm at 10 Mb/s with 10-3 BER achieved by the proposed receiver, corresponding to an operation distance over 10 meters under the FCC regulation.

[1]  H. Urkowitz.  Energy detection of unknown deterministic signals , 1967 .

[2]  John G. Proakis,et al.  Digital Communications , 1983 .

[3]  Thomas H. Lee,et al.  The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits: RF CIRCUITS THROUGH THE AGES , 2003 .

[4]  Moe Z. Win,et al.  Impulse radio: how it works , 1998, IEEE Communications Letters.

[5]  Edgar Sanchez-Sinencio,et al.  CMOS transconductance multipliers: a tutorial , 1998 .

[6]  Edgar Sanchez-Sinencio,et al.  Corrections to "CMOS transconductance multipliers: a tutorial" , 1999 .

[7]  Wayne E. Stark,et al.  Performance of ultra-wideband communications with suboptimal receivers in multipath channels , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[8]  A. Rabbachin,et al.  Synchronization analysis for UWB systems with a low-complexity energy collection receiver , 2004, 2004 International Workshop on Ultra Wideband Systems Joint with Conference on Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies. Joint UWBST & IWUWBS 2004 (IEEE Cat. No.04EX812).

[9]  Guerino Giancola,et al.  Understanding Ultra Wide Band Radio Fundamentals , 2004 .

[10]  A. Bevilacqua,et al.  An ultrawideband CMOS low-noise amplifier for 3.1-10.6-GHz wireless receivers , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[11]  I. Guvenc,et al.  Threshold-based TOA estimation for impulse radio UWB systems , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[12]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  Low power synchronization for wireless sensor network modems , 2005, IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2005.

[13]  D. Allstot,et al.  A CMOS 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB LNA employing stagger-compensated series peaking , 2006, IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2006.

[14]  Li-Rong Zheng,et al.  An innovative receiver architecture for autonomous detection of ultra-wideband signals , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[15]  Andrea Baschirotto,et al.  A 16mA UWB 3-to-5GHz 20Mpulses/s Quadrature Analog Correlation Receiver in 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[16]  A. Rabbachin,et al.  A low-complexity noncoherent IR-UWB transceiver architecture with TOA estimation , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[17]  C. Fu,et al.  3/spl sim/11-GHz CMOS UWB LNA using dual feedback for broadband matching , 2006, IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2006.

[18]  Chien-Nan Kuo,et al.  3 similar to 11-GHz CMOS UWB LNA using dual feedback for broadband matching , 2006, RFIC 2006.

[19]  Ismail Güvenç,et al.  Joint Parameter Estimation for UWB Energy Detectors Using OOK , 2007, Wirel. Pers. Commun..

[20]  Stefan Back Andersson,et al.  A 1.4V 25mW Inductorless Wideband LNA in 0.13/spl mu/m CMOS , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[21]  Hannu Tenhunen,et al.  An efficient passive RFID system for ubiquitous identification and sensing using impulse UWB radio , 2007, Elektrotech. Informationstechnik.

[22]  Li-Rong Zheng,et al.  Future RFID and Wireless Sensors for Ubiquitous Intelligence , 2008, 2008 NORCHIP.

[23]  Jianyun Hu,et al.  An Ultra-Wideband Resistive-Feedback Low-Noise Amplifier with Noise Cancellation in 0.18μm Digital CMOS , 2008, 2008 IEEE Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems.

[24]  Mariagrazia Graziano,et al.  A VHDL-AMS Simulation Environment for an UWB Impulse Radio Transceiver , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[25]  Marian Verhelst,et al.  Analysis of the QAC IR-UWB Receiver for Low Energy, Low Data-Rate Communication , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[26]  J. Romme,et al.  Noncoherent ultra-wideband systems , 2009, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[27]  Hannu Tenhunen,et al.  Impulse UWB energy detection receiver with energy offset synchronization scheme , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[28]  Hannu Tenhunen,et al.  A remote-powered RFID tag with 10Mb/s UWB uplink and −18.5dBm sensitivity UHF downlink in 0.18µm CMOS , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[29]  Andrea Bevilacqua,et al.  An Energy-Detector for Noncoherent Impulse-Radio UWB Receivers , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[30]  Denis C. Daly,et al.  A pulsed UWB receiver SoC for insect motion control , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers.

[31]  Hannu Tenhunen,et al.  A 9.2pJ/pulse UWB-IR transmitter with tunable amplitude for wireless sensor tags in 0.18um CMOS , 2010, NORCHIP 2010.

[32]  Marian Verhelst,et al.  A Reconfigurable, 130 nm CMOS 108 pJ/pulse, Fully Integrated IR-UWB Receiver for Communication and Precise Ranging , 2010, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[33]  Georges G. E. Gielen,et al.  Far-Field On-Chip Antennas Monolithically Integrated in a Wireless-Powered 5.8-GHz Downlink/UWB Uplink RFID Tag in 0.18-$\mu{\hbox {m}}$ Standard CMOS , 2010, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[34]  Li-Rong Zheng,et al.  Energy detection receiver with TOA estimation enabling positioning in passive UWB-RFID system , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.