A 0.6V and 0.53µW nonius TDC for a passive UHF RFID pressure sensor tag

This work presents a full passive UHF RFID pressure sensor tag which uses a nonius based TDC capacitive sensor interface. The proposed converter has a fully digital output and allows reducing power consumption while maintaining the required resolution. The nonius based TDC has been designed using TSMC 90nm standard CMOS technology. Post-layout simulations show that the converter presents a 12 bit resolution and 9 effective bits in the time range from 10μs to 40μs when VDD varies in the range from 0.55V to 0.7V and temperature variations in the range from 0°C to 60°C are considered. The maximum measurement time is 49.9μs and the average power consumption of the converter is 0.53μW at 10 samples per second from a 0.6V voltage supply.

[1]  A. Moschitta,et al.  A survey on time interval measurement techniques and testing methods , 2010, 2010 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Technology Conference Proceedings.

[2]  Roc Berenguer,et al.  Full Passive UHF Tag With a Temperature Sensor Suitable for Human Body Temperature Monitoring , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs.

[3]  R. Berenguer,et al.  Long range, low power UHF RFID analog front-end suitable for batteryless wireless sensors , 2010, 2010 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium.

[4]  T. Unander,et al.  Designing of RFID-Based Sensor Solution for Packaging Surveillance Applications , 2011, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[5]  Roc Berenguer,et al.  A passive UHF RFID pressure sensor tag with a 7.27 bit and 5.47pJ capacitive sensor interface , 2012, 2012 IEEE/MTT-S International Microwave Symposium Digest.

[6]  Ramesh Sharda,et al.  The promise of RFID-based sensors in the perishables supply chain , 2011, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[7]  Youngmin Park,et al.  A cyclic vernier time-to-digital converter synthesized from a 65nm CMOS standard library , 2010, Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[8]  Suhwan Kim,et al.  A 14.6 ps Resolution, 50 ns Input-Range Cyclic Time-to-Digital Converter Using Fractional Difference Conversion Method , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[9]  Daniel S. Yeung,et al.  A brief survey on current RFID applications , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics.

[10]  Amine Bermak,et al.  A Sub-$\mu$ W Embedded CMOS Temperature Sensor for RFID Food Monitoring Application , 2010, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[11]  Roc Berenguer,et al.  Nonius based time-to-digital converter for low-power RFID sensory systems , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on RFID-Technologies and Applications.

[12]  Stephan Henzler,et al.  A Local Passive Time Interpolation Concept for Variation-Tolerant High-Resolution Time-to-Digital Conversion , 2008, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[13]  Ehsan Afshari,et al.  Delay-Line-Based Analog-to-Digital Converters , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs.