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 fmaxof 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). At 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 inphase quadrature configuration to compensate for destructive interference that may be caused by varying distance between reader and tag.