• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.10
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• pp.45-52
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• 2008

We investigated the design of an RF-powered, wireless temperature sensor tag chip using $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. The transponder generates its own power supply from small incident RF signal using Schottky diodes in voltage multiplier. Ambient temperature is measured using a new low-power temperature-to-voltage converter, and an 8-bit single-slope ADC converts the measured voltage to digital data. ASK demodulator and digital control are combined to identify unique transponder (ID) sent by base station for multi-transponder applications. The measurement of the temperature sensor tag chip showed a resolution of $0.64^{\circ}C/LSB$ in the range from $20^{\circ}C$ to $100^{\circ}C$, which is suitable for environmental temperature monitoring. The chip size is $1.1{\times}0.34mm^2$, and operates at clock frequency of 100 kHz while consuming $64{\mu}W$ power. The temperature sensor required a -11 dBm RF input power, supported a conversion rate of 12.5 k-samples/sec, and a maximum error of $0.5^{\circ}C$.