A 3.6cm2 wirelessly-powered UWB SoC with −30.7dBm rectifier sensitivity and sub-10cm range resolution

This paper discusses the design of a battery-less wirelessly-powered UWB system-on-a-chip (SoC) tag for area-constrained localization applications. An antenna-rectifier co-design methodology optimizes sensitivity and increases range under tag area constraints. A low-voltage (0.8-V) UWB TX enables high rectifier sensitivity by reducing required rectifier output voltage. The 2.4GHz rectifier, power-management unit and 8GHz UWB TX are integrated in 65nm CMOS and the rectifier demonstrates state-of-the-art −30.7dBm sensitivity for 1V output with only 1.3cm² antenna area, representing a 2.3× improvement in sensitivity over previously published work, at 2.6× higher frequency with 9× smaller antenna area. Measurements in an office corridor demonstrate 20m range with 36dBm TX EIRP. The 0.8-V 8GHz UWB TX consumes 64pJ/pulse at 28MHz pulse repetition rate and achieves 2.4GHz −10dB bandwidth. Wireless measurements demonstrate sub-10cm range resolution at range > 10m.