SBIR Phase I: Clock-on-Demand: High Performance, Ultra Low Power

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project is to develop a solution to a fundamental issue in low power Ultra Wide Band (UWB) transmitter design to be specifically applied to the field of passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Although UWB radio is inherently low power and efficient from a power per bit point of view, its high data rates and mandated higher spectral utilization make a precise and fast and thereby large and power dissipating oscillator imperative. Passive radio and the class of radio devices that are powered by the EM field generated by the interrogating device cannot afford a fast embedded oscillator, since they are both constrained by size and cost. However, as any radio technology, this class of RF devices would benefit from the features and advantages offered by the UWB technology. It will be possible to design a completely passive tag that uses UWB as means of uplink communication between the passive unit and the interrogator. RFID is an exponentially growing market. However, the technology that supports its expansion is not able to provide robust communication and signaling between a tag and a reader. Furthermore, today's technology only supports a low tag density (10s of tags/sec/m2), while the applications that will fuel the exponential expansion of the RFID market, like point-of-sale, inventory management, shelf management, etc., require 100s and 1000s of tags/sec/m2. The proposed approach to generating a fast on-demand clock offers an ultra-low power clock solution for passive radio and similar extremely constrained power budget devices.