A single-chip CMOS UHF RFID reader transceiver

A novel single-chip 860-960MHz band UHF RFID reader transceiver IC is fabricated in 0.18μm CMOS technology. The transceiver consists of a compact high-linearity low-noise-figure RF front-end, a programmable analog baseband for Rx path; and an image reject filter, a PGA, a switchable up-conversion modulator and a driver amplifier for Tx path. The 3-bit 3rd-order DSM fractional-N frequency synthesizer with optimized all-band phase noise performance is integrated to implement Rx/Tx frequency translation. The transceiver IC has a die area of 4mm×4mm. It achieves IIP3 of 13dBm, sensitivity of -75dBm in listen-before-talk (LBT) mode and -66dBm in normal mode in the presence of -4.4dBm self-jammer for the backscatter modulation while drawing 112mA from 3.3V power supply.