High Data Rate Single Chip Battery Free Active Millimeter Wave Identification Tag in 65 nm CMOS Technology
In this paper, a class of high data rate battery free yet active miniature radio frequency identification tag without any external components (except antenna) operating at millimeter (mm) wave frequencies is proposed and demonstrated. This fully embedded tag consists of a recently proposed CMOS based zero intermediate frequency self oscillating mixer, a high power conversion efficiency mm wave to dc rectifier, and an ultralow power voltage regulator on a single chip, integrated with ceramic based antennas. Interconnection between the CMOS die and the antenna is realized using a wire bonding technique, which is compensated and optimized to match the antenna input impedance and also to minimize the wire bond associated losses at mm frequencies. The 10x10 mm2 tag wirelessly harvests its energy from an incoming signal at 24 GHz, receives, and recovers the data sent by reader on an amplitude modulation (AM) modulated 40 GHz carrier, and transmits its data back to the reader on a 40 GHz carrier, using AM modulation as well. The tag exhibits a bit rate of about 500 kb/s during the reader to tag communication and 10 Mb/s during the tag to reader communication, solely relying on the rectified energy for powering its operation. To the best of our knowledge, such an mm wave identification tag at mm wave frequencies has never been reported in the literature.
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques