Design Verification and Test Techniques for UHF RFID Tag IC

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been rapidly developed in recent years. Electronic tag constitutes an important part of RFID system. This paper presents the design verification and test techniques suitable for UHF (Ultra High Frequency) RFID passive tag, which can meet the designers’ demand for verification and test. Then, the IC baseband circuit test platform based on field programmable gate array is proposed. The platform can be used to verify the function of baseband circuit at design stage. It can also help designers with HDL (Hardware Description Language) code commissioning, so as to improve the reliability of circuit design, which can greatly improve the success rate of tape-out in practical applications. With regard to IC RF parameter test, this paper comes up with a low-cost test technical solution based on the commercially available card reader and the adjustable attenuator, which can be used to accurately measure the RF parameters such as IC sensitivity and input impedance without special RFID equipment, so as to guide the design of antenna and RFID. Based on the above-mentioned test scheme, the UHF RFID Tag IC that has been developed and taped out is tested in this paper.