A low-power dual-clock strategy for digital circuits of EPC Gen2 RFID tag

Abstract

Power consumption is critical to the performance of EPC Gen2 RFID tags. System clock frequency of tags should be as low as possible to reduce the power consumption and still conform to the protocol. This paper analyses the impact of different clock strategies on digital circuits of EPC Gen2 tag. An error shift approach is proposed to reduce the backscatter link frequency (BLF) errors. A dual-clock strategy with both 1.28 and 2.56 MHz clocks for the digital circuits is developed. Compared with the 1.92 MHz unitary-clock strategy, the dual-clock strategy offers larger decoding margins and BLF margins, consumes 5.66% to 9.44% less power estimated in CMOS 0.18μm technologies, and fully conforms to the EPC Gen2 protocol as well.