Adresse de la société populaire de Sauveur-sur-Douve (ci-devant Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche), lors de la séance du 17 brumaire an III (7 novembre 1794). In: Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 - Première série (1787-1799) Tome C - Du 3 au 18 brumaire an III (24 octobre au 8 novembre 1794) Paris : CNRS éditions, 2000. pp. 482-483

Bourdel, Sylvain

Gaubert, Jean

Vauche, R.

Persee: Revues scientifique en sciences humaines et sociales

Adresse de la société populaire de Sauveur-sur-Douve (ci-devant Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche), lors de la séance du 17 brumaire an III (7 novembre 1794)

International audienceThe design of a remotely UHF powered UWB transmitter is presented in 0.13µm CMOS standard process. Multi-Vt technique and CMOS logic allows pulse generator power consumption between two consecutive pulses to be reduced enough to be remotely powered. It achieves FCC compliant pulses having 2Vpp and a power consumption of 10.7uW@100kb.s-1 

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Ultra Low Power Pulse Generator for RFID
Applications
R. Vauche, Sylvain Bourdel, Jean Gaubert
To cite this version:
R. Vauche, Sylvain Bourdel, Jean Gaubert. Ultra Low Power Pulse Generator for RFID Applications.
Sophia Antipolis Micro Electronics forum, 2011, Sophia Antipolis, France. ￿hal-02470055￿
 SAME 2011 Forum - October 12 & 13, 2011                                                    
 1 
 
Abstract 
The design of a remotely UHF powered UWB 
transmitter is presented in 0.13µm CMOS standard 
process. Multi-Vt technique and CMOS logic 
allows pulse generator power consumption between 
two consecutive pulses to be reduced enough to be 
remotely powered. It achieves FCC compliant 
pulses having 2Vpp and a power consumption of 
10.7uW@100kb.s-1. 
 
Keywords 
Pulse Generator; Remotely Powered; RFID; Tag 
Localization; UWB; 
 
1. Introduction 
Due to its rapid adoption in industry, RFID 
technology is facing new application demands. 
Especially, accurate Real Time Location (RTL), 
robust and secure identification and management of 
large Tag number are needed to address new 
purposes and new markets is all the more difficult to 
satisfy since the Tag cost must be lower than few 
tens of cents. Consequently the tag must be 
fabricated using, low cost technologies: a single 
CMOS chip in a low cost technology with no 
external devices such as crystals or filter and 
moreover the chip must be remote-powered to avoid 
the use of costly cells or battery. 
Because UHF RFID technology uses narrowband 
continuous waves around 900MHz, it is intrinsically 
limited for high resolution location, sensitive to 
multipath cancellation and affected by multi-users 
interferences. Even if improvements can still be 
achieved on UHF RFID systems, a technological 
breakthrough is needed to overcome all those 
limitations. According to recent works, [1] UWB-IR 
is a promising technique for the next generation of 
RFID systems and has been recently proposed as a 
possible physical layer of the new IEEE 802.15.4f 
standard. The very short time duration of the emitted 
pulse enables (i) accurate localization with TOA or 
TDOA techniques [1], (ii) efficient power gating 
which allows power consumption to be reduced, (iii) 
high multipath resolution which allows the coverage 
area to be increased, (iv) efficient multiple access 
and interference mitigation allowing the increase the 
number of Tags [2][3][4][5][6]. 
Several communication techniques can be 
implemented to achieve the uplink in a Remotely 
Powered UWB Tag. A first solution is to use UWB 
backscatter propagation [7]. Backscattering is very 
well suited to passive Tag because it consumes a 
very small amount of power since it consists in 
varying the input impedance of the circuit. 
Unfortunately, the backscatter signal has very low 
energy which degrades the localization accuracy [4]. 
Another solution is to use an ultra low power UWB 
pulse generator remotely powered by an UHF 
downlink [8]. Indeed UWB pulse generators are 
known to consume a very small amount of energy 
for a pulse emission. In [9] we demonstrated an 
energy consumption of 9pJ per pulse with 10dBm 
pulse peak power. Such low energy per pulse 
consumption enables ultra low power consumption 
at low data rate (few tens of microwatt for 1Mbs-1 
bit rate) which can be supplied by a standard UHF 
energy harvesting unit. 
Recent works showed the feasibility of UHF/UWB 
hybrid RFID Tags [8][10]. It appears that achieving 
high energy pulse with a very small power budget 
is a bottleneck which finally limits the localization 
accuracy and the range. To improve the energy 
efficiency of the pulse generator, high energy pulse 
must be used [1]. But in the same time the energy 
consumed by pulse must be minimized. Especially, 
reducing the power consumed between the 
emissions of two consecutive pulses is highly 
required to reach ultra low power consumption at 
medium or low rate. Moreover, the efficiency of the 
energy harvesting unit must also be maximized to 
increase the available power and so the localization 
accuracy and the tag reader range. 
 
In this paper we present an Ultra Low Power pulse 
generator for RFID applications. The pulse 
generator is designed to be remotely-powered by an 
UHF harvesting unit. The next part deals with the 
power budget of the proposed system. The third 
part presents the design of the pulse generator. 
Measurement results are then given in the fourth 
part.  
 
SAME 2011 Forum 
 
University Booth 
 
Ultra Low Power Pulse Generator for RFID Applications 
 
R. Vauché1, S. Bourdel1, J. Gaubert1 
 
1 Aix-Marseille University, IM2NP, and CNRS, IM2NP (UMR 6242), France 
 SAME 2011 Forum - October 12 & 13, 2011                                                    
 2 
2. Power Budget 
Due to the gated nature of an UWB signal, the mean 
power consumption of a pulse generator is a 
function of the mean bit rate (Db-mean) and is given as 
follows: 
_ 0Hzcons PG ap b meanP E D P−=  +  (1) 
where P0Hz is constant DC power consumed at 0Hz 
PRF and Eap is the active energy added while pulse 
is generated.  
To properly power supply the pulse generator with 
UHF harvesting, the harvesting unit must provide an 
available power (Pav-HU) at least equal to Pcons_PG. Pav-
HU depends on the efficiency  of the harvesting unit 
and on the emitted power allowed for the UHF 
downlink EIRP as follows: 
2
_ _
4
cons PG av HUP P EIRP
d



 
= =  
 
 () 
where  is the wavelength of the UHF downlink. 
 
Using (1) and (2), the mean bit rate is evaluated as a 
function of the communication range as follows: 
 
2
0Hz
1
.
4
b mean
ap
D EIRP P
E d



−
  
= −  
   
   (3) 
 
3. Pulse generator design 
Among the different UWB pulse generation 
techniques, many works show that filtered combined 
edge method is well-suited when an high energy 
efficiency is required as in remote powered UHF 
applications [9][15][16]. The presented generator is 
a derivative of a previous designed pulse generator 
which consumes a static current of 2.6mA due to 
integrated digital edge combiner based on Current 
Mode Logic (CML) gates [9]. To reduce the static 
power consumption, the choice of a standard CMOS 
logic associated to a power manager is assumed.  
As shown in Fig.5, UWB pulse generator can be 
divided in four parts, the band-pass filter, the high-
Vt current driver, the low-Vt digital edge combiner, 
and the high-Vt power manager. 
Band-pass Filter is uses Bessel-Thompson 
coefficient which allows UWB pulse duration to be 
minimized. Its input and output are matched to 50Ω 
impedance in order to maximize power transfer to 
50Ω antenna.  
High-Vt Current Driver linked to Band-pass Filter is 
a C class amplifier where current driver drain is 
biased by L. C1 capacitor prevents VDD biasing of 
others filter nodes. Finally, a baseband pulses must 
be applied on High-Vt Current Driver gate to emit 
UWB pulses. A sizing method of the driver 
regarding the application needs and the filter 
characteristics is given in [9].  
Low-Vt Digital Edge Combiner generates baseband 
pulses needed by High-Vt Current driver for UWB 
pulses generation. It is only designed with low-Vt 
MOS devices and supplied by Power Managed 
Supply thanks to V-VDD and V-GND.  
High-Vt Power manager consists in D flip-flops, a 
delay cell, logic buffers, and a balun and uses only 
high-Vt MOS devices. It allows complementary 
power management signals which drive Power 
Managed Supply (PM and PM\) to be generated.  
To generate an UWB pulse, a rising edge has to be 
applied on High-Vt Power Manager input (CK) 
which allows power management to be disable 
(PM=’0’ and PM\=’1’). Then, a 500ps delayed 
rising edge is generated on CKd thanks to three 
strings of balanced and unbalanced inverters. This 
ensures that all V-VDD and V-GND supplies of 
Low-Vt Digital Edge Combiner are enable when it 
is propagating into itself.  
In Low-Vt Digital Edge Combiner, rising edge from 
CKd is propagating in a string of buffered inverters 
loaded by a capacitor. Next, the buffered rising edge 
A2 is combined with the buffered falling edge B2 to 
make an inverted baseband pulse thanks to fast 
NAND logic gate. Capacitors in buffered inverters 
string are sized with the help of post-layout 
simulations to have a 75ps width buffered baseband 
pulse on driver current gate. This baseband pulse 
width is sized regarding the designed band-pass 
filter [9]. 
 
 SAME 2011 Forum - October 12 & 13, 2011                                                    
 3 
After the baseband pulse and so UWB pulse are 
issued, a falling edge is generated on CKd and Low-
Vt Digital Edge Combiner is put in its sleeping state. 
When the falling edge arrives on CKend, END is set 
to ‘1’ and power manager is enable (PM=’1’ and 
PM\=’0’). Finally, END is set to ‘0’ when CK is 
reset.  
4. Measurement results 
The pulse generator presented in this work has been 
realized in a 0.13µm CMOS process from 
STMicroelectronics and is shown on Fig. 2. 
Voltage supply is 1.2V and die area is 0.64mm². It 
achieves FCC compliant pulses with 2Vpp on 50Ω 
resistive load. Central frequency and 10dB 
bandwidth are respectively equal to 6.15GHz and 
5.2GHz. P0Hz is equal to 3,91uW and Eap is 67.7pJ 
wich leads to total power consumption of 
10.7uW@100kb.s-1. 
 
 
Fig.2 Die Photograph 
 
According to Eq. 3, the mean bit rate when tag 
reader is at 10 meters is 4,3kb.s-1 assuming an UHF 
energy harvesting unit having an efficiency of 15 
percent. 
 
References 
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Win, “Ultrawide Bandwidth RFID: The next generation?,” 
Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 98, pp. 1570–1582, 
September 2010. 
[2] D. Ha and P. Schaumont, "Replacing cryptography with 
ultra wideband (UWB) modulation in secure RFID," 
International Conference on RFID, IEEE RFID 2007, pp. 
23–29, March 2007. 
[3] M. Z. Win and A. Scholtz, " Impulse radio: How it works," 
IEEE Communicatons Letters, vol.2, pp. 23–29, February 
1998. 
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About the Authors 
Rémy Vauché was born in Epinal, France, in 1985. He was 
accepted for preparation for the 
competitive entrance examinations to 
French Engineering Schools, Metz, 
France, in 2003. He received the M.Eng 
degree in microelectronics and 
telecommunication from Polytech' 
Marseille and the M.S. in 
microelectronics and nanoelectronics 
from Aix-Marseille University, 
Marseille France, in 2008.He is currently 
a Ph.D. student of Aix-Marseille University with the IM2NP 
laboratory. His current research interests include UWB radio 
transceiver design in 0.13µm CMOS technology for low-power 
and low-cost applications. 
 


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Ultra Low Power Pulse Generator for RFID Applications

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Adresse de la société populaire de Sauveur-sur-Douve (ci-devant Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche), lors de la séance du 17 brumaire an III (7 novembre 1794)

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