A high accuracy 3.1V voltage limiter for enabling high performance RFID sensor applications.

Abstract

This paper presents a low power voltage limiter design that avoids possible damages in the analog front-end of a RFID sensor due to voltage surges whenever the tag gets close to the reader. The proposed voltage limiter design takes advantage of the implemented bandgap reference block in order to provide a highly accurate limiting voltage in spite of temperature variation and process dispersion. The measured limiting voltage is 3.1V while showing a low current consumption of 100nA when the reader and the tag are far away, so that the sensitivity of the tag is not impacted due to an undesired consumption in the voltage limiter. The circuit is implemented in a low cost 180nm CMOS technology.