Measured wideband near-field characteristics of an UWB RFID tag with On-Chip Antenna

The combination of UWB Impulse Radio with RFID technology is proposed, implemented and analysed in this paper. For future RFID technologies, inexpensive and power efficient transceivers on the tag side are necessary for the application of Smart Dust and the Internet of Things. Therefore, we have designed and manufactured two silicon prototypes of a reconfigurable frontend of an UWB impulse radio transmitter with a total size of 1×1.3mm². This includes an On-Chip Antenna which is manufactured in a standard CMOS. The centre frequency and the bandwidth of the radiated pulse are controllable as well as the data rate of the modulated signal. The embedded voltage controlled oscillator allows the characterisation of the On-Chip Antennas without the need of any external RF feeding structure. We emphasize this issue because RF feeding structures are inadequate for On-Chip Antenna measurements; they interfere heavily with the device under test. With this prototype we are able to perform antenna and communication characterisation measurements towards passive ultra wideband RFID tags.