A Single-Chip UHF RFID Reader Transceiver IC

A single-chip UHF RFID reader transceiver IC has been implemented in 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The chip includes all transceiver blocks as RX/TX RF front-end, RX/TX analog baseband, frequency synthesizer and IC with fully-compliant China 800/900 MHz RFID draft, ISO/IEC 18000-6C protocol and ETSI 302 208-1 local regulation. The normal mode receiver in the presence of −3 dBm self-jammer achieves −75 dBm 1% PER sensitivity. The linear class-A PA integrated in transmitter has 25 dBm OP1 dB output power for CW. The fully-integrated fractional-N frequency synthesizer is designed based on MASH 1-1-1 sigma-delta modulator and 1.8 GHz fundamental frequency LC-VCO for lower in-band and out-of-band phase noise. The measured phase noise is up to −106 dBc/Hz@200 kHz and −131 dBc/Hz@1 MHz offset from center frequency and the integrated RMS jitter from 10 kHz to 10 MHz is less than 1.6 pS. The chip dissipates 330 mA from 3.3 V power supply when transmitting 22.4 dBm CW signal and the PAE of linear PA is up to 26%. The chip die area is 16.8 mm.