A low‐power amplitude shift keying modulator based on adaptive body‐biased injection‐locked current‐reuse voltage controlled oscillator for high data rate radio frequency identification applications

Abstract

AbstractA low‐power consuming amplitude‐shift keying (ASK) modulator designed in 130 nm CMOS technology and operating at 10.5 GHz frequency is presented in this work. The modulator is based on current‐reuse voltage‐controlled oscillator (VCO) which uses the effects of adaptive body‐biasing and injection locking (IL) to achieve low‐phase noise and low‐power operation. The VCO has a phase noise of −106 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The ASK modulator consumes 790 μW with a 1.1 V voltage supply and draws an average current of 719 μA. For applying the bulk‐biasing signal, a deep n‐well NMOS is used in the PMOS‐NMOS oscillator pair which isolates the substrate and avoids the current path through it. The post‐layout simulation results of the 0.5 × 0.5 mm2 modulator IC verify its low‐power, low‐phase noise operation. It is intended for use in self‐powered active high data rate radio‐frequency identification (RFID) tags.