A Wirelessly Powered UWB RFID Sensor Tag With Time-Domain Analog-to-Information Interface

Abstract

This paper presents a wirelessly powered radio frequency identification sensor tag with an analog-to-information interface. A time-domain interface, incorporating an ultra-low-power impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmitter (TX), is employed. The analog signal from the sensor is compared with a triangular waveform, resulting in a pulse-position modulation signal to trigger UWB pulses. Thanks to the high time-resolution IR-UWB radio, time intervals of the impulses can be used to represent the original input value, which is measured remotely on the reader side by a time-of-arrival estimator. This approach not only eliminates the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) but also significantly reduces the number of bits to be transmitted for power saving. The proposed tag is fabricated in a 0.18-μm CMOS process with an active area of 2.5 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . The measurement results demonstrate that a 300-kS/s sampling rate with a 6.7-bit effective number of bits (ENOB) is obtained via a UWB receiver with a sensitivity of -93 dBm and an integration window of 10 ns. The ENOB is improved to 7.3 bits when the integration window is reduced to 2 ns. The tag can be powered up by a -18-dBm UHF input signal. The power consumption of the proposed tag is 41.5 μW yielding a 1.3-pJ/conv.step figure of merit, offering 9× and 67× improvements compared with the state of the art based on an ADC and a backscattering TX, and the tag based on an ADC and a narrowband TX, respectively.