Verification methodology for battery lifetime requirements of higher class UHF RFID tags

Abstract

Today's higher class tags usually are powered by batteries. The battery's capacity and the application's power demand influence the operational lifetime of the tag. Therefore, the designated application and lifetime requirement have to be kept in mind when designing a higher class tag. Moreover, the lifetime requirement needs to be verified in order to ensure the application will be successful. However, verification of the lifetime requirement is usually a very complex task. A verification environment for the application and its lifetime requirement needs to be created manually. After simulation with a battery model the results can be compared to the requirements document. Due to the complex and time-consuming nature of verification this often results in later time-to-market and increasing costs. In this work we present a novel, highly automated methodology to verify battery lifetime requirements. From the requirements document of the higher class UHF RFID tag a verification environment is created automatically. After power estimation is performed a battery model can be connected to the automatically generated lifetime verification environment. Finally, simulation is performed to verify whether the higher class UHF RFID tag fulfills the lifetime requirement of the application. The main benefit of our methodology is a decrease in the verification effort due to the high degree of automation in the creation of the verification environment. Moreover, simulation time is decreased which enables faster exploration of various batteries. This results in faster time-to-market and a reduction of costs.