Power Harvester Design for Passive UHF RFID Tag Using a Voltage Boosting Technique

This paper presents a guideline to design and optimize a power harvester circuit for an RF identification transponder. A power harvester has been designed and fabricated in a CMOS 0.18- process that operates at the UHF band of 920 MHz. The circuit employs an impedance transformation circuit to boost the input RF signal that leads to the improvement of the circuit performance. The power harvester has been optimized to achieve maximum sensitivity by characterizing both the impedance transformation network and the rectifier circuit and choosing the optimum values for the circuit parameters. The measurement results show sensitivity of 14.1 dBm for dc output voltage of 1 V and the output current of 2 mum that corresponds to the output power of 2 muW.

[1]  Y. Tsividis.  Operation and modeling of the MOS transistor , 1987 .

[2]  Valerie M. Thomas,et al.  Optimization of inductive RFID technology , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment. 2001 IEEE ISEE (Cat. No.01CH37190).

[3]  Martin Fischer,et al.  Fully integrated passive UHF RFID transponder IC with 16.7-μW minimum RF input power , 2003, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.

[4]  H. Yoshida,et al.  A 950-MHz rectifier circuit for sensor network tags with 10-m distance , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[5]  H. Taub,et al.  Communication Circuits: Analysis and Design , 1973, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[6]  M.P. Flynn,et al.  A new transponder architecture with on-chip ADC for long-range telemetry applications , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[7]  Klaus Finkenzeller,et al.  Book Reviews: RFID Handbook: Fundamentals and Applications in Contactless Smart Cards and Identification, 2nd ed. , 2004, ACM Queue.

[8]  Brian Ellis.  The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits , 2004 .

[9]  K. K. Clarke,et al.  Communication Circuits: Analysis and Design , 1971 .

[10]  M. Ghovanloo,et al.  Fully integrated wideband high-current rectifiers for inductively powered devices , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

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

[12]  D. Friedman,et al.  A low-power CMOS integrated circuit for field-powered radio frequency identification tags , 1997, 1997 IEEE International Solids-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[13]  C. Dehollain,et al.  Remotely powered addressable UHF RFID integrated system , 2005, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[14]  P. Heydari,et al.  Ultra-low power RFIC design using moderately inverted MOSFETs: an analytical/experimental study , 2006, IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2006.

[15]  Tom Ahlkvist Scharfeld.  An analysis of the fundamental constraints on low cost passive radio-frequency identification system design , 2001 .

[16]  G. Iannaccone,et al.  Design criteria for the RF section of UHF and microwave passive RFID transponders , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.