Design of a Low Power and High-Efficiency Charge Pump Circuit for RFID Transponder EEPROM

Labonnah Farzana Rahman ,Lubna Alam ,Mohammad Marufuzzaman

doi:10.33180/infmidem2020.403

Abstract

Charge pump (CP) circuit is an essential part of a radio frequency identification electrically-erasable-programmable-read-only memory (RFID-EEPROM). A CP circuit generates boosted output voltage than the power supply voltage. However, the performance of the diode configured CP circuits is strongly affected by the extra power dissipation and the parasitic capacitance. The parasitic capacitors of the CP circuit are also responsible for consuming more power. In this research, an improved CP circuit is designed for achieving higher output voltage gain by reducing the parasitic capacitances. Moreover, the proposed circuit is consumed lower power, which made it more suitable for low power applications like RFID transponder. The proposed CP circuit is using the internal boosted voltage for backward control where active controls are applied to the charge transfer switch (CTS) to eradicate the reverse charge sharing trends. Simulated results showed that by using 1 pF pumping capacitor to drive the capacitive output load, the proposed circuit generates 9.56 V under 1.2 V power supply. In comparison with other research, works this CP circuit is consumed much lower power only 15.26 µW, which is lower than previous research works. Moreover, the proposed CTS CP circuit can produce a higher efficiency of 79.3%, which is found higher compared to other research works. Thus, the proposed design will be an essential module for low power applications like RFID transponder EEPROM.

Highlights

A typical RFID transponder is known as data carrying devices in RFID systems
The operating temperature was set to 27o C for the charge transfer switch (CTS) charge pump (CP) circuit and the ELDOSPICE simulator (Mentor Graphics) was used within Silterra 0.13 μm CMOS process
The output voltage of the designed eight-stage CP circuit with power supply voltage VDD= 1.2 V should be as high as 9.6 V (1.2 x 8 = 9.6 V)

Summary

Introduction

A typical RFID transponder is known as data carrying devices in RFID systems. RFID transponder can be embedded in objects like electronic devices, luggage, pets, or human being for identification. A typical RFID chip contains mainly three blocks, such as analogue, logic, and memory blocks. To store information in the readerless RFID transponder, a small amount of NVM should be embedded [2] Transponder memory can contain read-only memory (ROM), Random Access Memory (RAM), non-volatile memory as EEPROM, flash memory, etc. Among them embedded NVM such as EEPROM is mostly used as tag memory in RFID, SoC, and FPGA systems. The prerequisites, additional masks, and fabrication steps made EEPROM and Flash memory highly expensive compared to a standard CMOS logic process. Many researchers wanted to develop EEPROM in a traditional CMOS logic process as it has the advantages of low cost and low power [5]-[8]

Methods

Results

Conclusion