Digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits for an RFID telemetry system

Abstract

Digital and mixed-signal circuits have been developed for use in an inductively-coupled RFID telemetry system that can interface with a sensor. The cells developed include a turn-on/brown-out detector, clock recovery circuit, a cyclic-redundancy code (CRC) generator, and a frequency-shift keying (FSK) modulator. These cells were designed for use in an RFID tag that also uses a novel approach to performing analog-to-digital conversion. The circuits were fabricated using the AMI 1.5 um CMOS process and tested using LabVIEWtrade. A key feature of these cells is their low current consumption of only 1-2 uA for the CRC generator and 5 uA for the clock recovery circuit.