Issues in Integrated Circuit Design for UHF RFID

With the recent explosive growth of the market demand for RFID systems, design of RFID tag and reader IC has become one of the most popular research areas. This paper gives a review of several key issues in the UHF RFID tag and reader design. To achieve a higher identification performance, a low cost, low power RFID tag with efficient anti-collision technique which provides a large throughput and flexible security mechanism is required. Moreover, the package of tag becomes a bottleneck to further reduce the RFID cost. In RFID reader design, the carrier leakage problem is a significant challenge which limits the sensitivity of the RFID receiver. And in order to increase the integration of an RFID system, a multi-mode, high efficient CMOS PA with a sufficient output power is preferred to be integrated in the reader transceiver IC. Three design instances are given to demonstrate the challenges of RFID IC design.