Abstract: A novel ultralow-voltage,low-power baseband processor for UHF RFID tags is presented.It is compatible with the "EPCTM Class-1 Generation-2 UHF RFID Protocol" and meets the special requirement of power consumption for passive tags.A new architecture of low-power baseband-processors fit for a power management scheme with a gated clock is proposed.It not only uses a novel scheme for generating pseudo-random numbers and a new partial decoder circuit,but also adopts other low-power technologies,such as a pipeline structure and reduced logic depth.The baseband processor can implement complex functions,including encoding/coding,anti-collision schemes,authorization schemes,and reading/writing operations to EEPROM.The chip is designed and fabricated using a 0.35μm 1P3M CMOS standard process.The minimum operation voltage is 1.5V,average current is 2.1μA,and power consumption is 3.15μW,with a die area of 1.1mm×0.8mm.

Key words: RFID, tag, low-power, baseband processor, instantaneous power