A single-chip UHF RFID reader transceiver for mobile applications

A single-chip UHF RFID reader transceiver for mobile applications has been fabricated in 0.18μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The chip includes all transceiver blocks as RX/TX RF front-end, RX/TX analog baseband, frequency synthesizer and I²C with fully-compliant China 800/900MHz RFID draft, ISO/IEC 18000-6C protocol and ETSI 302 208-1 local regulation. The receiver in the presence of -3dBm self-jammer achieves -75dBm 1% PER sensitivity. The linear class-A PA integrated in transmitter has 25dBm OP1dB output power for CW. The fully-integrated fractional-N frequency synthesizer is designed based on MASH 1-1-1 sigma-delta modulator and 1.8GHz fundamental frequency LC-VCO for lower in-band and out-of-band phase noise. The measured phase noise is up to -106.2dBc/Hz at 200kHz offset and -130.2dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from center frequency and the integrated RMS jitter from 10kHz to 10MHz is less than 1.6pS. The whole chip dissipates 330mA from 3.3V power supply when transmitting 22.4dBm CW signal and the PAE of linear PA is up to 26%. The chip area is 16.8mm².