Fully integrated passive UHF RFID transponder IC with a sensitivity of −12 dBm

This paper presents a fully integrated passive UHF RFID transponder, which includes an RF/analog front-end, a baseband processor and a 512-bit EEPROM memory. To improve power conversion efficiency, Schottky barrier diode based rectifier is adopted. The design of a novel voltage limiter is discussed in detail, which can provide a stable limiting voltage with low sensitivity to temperature variation and process dispersion. The whole transponder chip is implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS process with a die size of 800×800 μm². Measurement results show that the total power consumption of the tag chip is only 7.4μW with a sensitivity of -12dBm.