Power and energy optimization of the digital core of a Gen2 long range full passive RFID sensor tag

The communication range of a passive RFID is severely limited by the total power consumption of the tag. Even more if a sensor is implemented within the tag. This paper studies the energetic behavior of an EPC Gen2 compliant RFID sensor tag and presents a power optimized architecture in order to maximize the communication range. Moreover, a criteria to select the optimum value of the supply capacitor is presented. Results are obtained for the 0.35 μm technology of X-FAB (XL035). The proposed techniques make it possible to achieve a significant power consumption reduction and thus, double the communication range.