Fully integrated ultra-low-power 900 MHz RF transceiver for batteryless wireless microsystems

Abstract

This paper presents a ultra low power 900 MHz RF transceiver IC. The IC harvests energy from 900 MHz RF carrier wave. The IC has −17 dBm minimum read operation power sensitivity. Analog function blocks, a digital baseband, and a memory system operate with 0.8 V ∼ 2.0 V supply voltage range without voltage regulator. Only current-starved ring oscillator operates 0.6 V with calibration. Most of analog blocks adopted low power subthreshold operating design. The memory system is chosen 512-bit Fowler-Nordheim tunneling non volatile memory (NVM). Digital baseband is designed to clock gating, clock recovery, balanced power distribution, and adaptive power consumption methodology. The transceiver IC is implemented in the 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The overall power consumption of designed IC is only 2.64 μW at 0.8 V supply voltage. The chip size is 0.65 mm × 0.65 mm.