A 61-GHz SiGe Transceiver Frontend for Energy and Data Transmission of Passive RFID Single-Chip Tags With Integrated Antennas

This paper presents SiGe-based transmitter and receiver chips for a radio frequency identification (RFID) frontend in the 61-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band. The chips are fabricated in a modern 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with HBTs offering an fT of 250 GHz and fmax of 370 GHz. The presented transmitter consists of a fundamental voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), a power amplifier (PA), lumped element Wilkinson power dividers, and a static divide-by-16 chain for stabilization within a phase-locked loop (PLL). Two variants of the transmitter are fabricated with supply voltages of 3.3 and 5 V, respectively. The transmitters are designed to provide an efficient signal source to supply a passive RFID tag with the maximum allowed 20-dBm effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) for short-range devices. The 3.3-V transmitter chip achieves a peak output power of 17 dBm, PAEPA of 18.6% and dc-to-RF efficiency of 12.9% (excluding the divider). A t 61 GHz, a phase noise of -102 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset is achieved. The power consumption for the 5- and 3.3-V transmitter chips is 710 and 482 mW, respectively. The receiver chip is implemented as two Gilbert cell mixers in-phase quadrature configuration to compensate for destructive interference that may be caused by varying distance between reader and tag.