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

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This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II research project is to develop a prototype and proof of concept for the tag and reader that uses an innovative low power Clock-on-Demand (CoD) and baseband/ media access controller (MAC) calibration algorithm to be used with ultra wideband communication systems. The new CoD and algorithm are motivated by application of ultra wideband to the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) market. In this prototype, the CoD and the baseband/MAC layer algorithm are implemented in standard CMOS for tag and the UWB receiver and narrowband receiver with discrete components for reader. The low power requirement is achieved by the CoD and by dividing the time into epochs and epochs into slots. The CoD only runs until the tag transmits its impulse in the relevant slot, and the reader decodes the ID representations of all tags by the slot number. Therefore, if an epoch is divided into 210 slots, an impulse by tag represents 10 bits of the information. The robustness is achieved by having an UWB impulse transmitter in the tag and by repeating the impulse in different epochs. 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), 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.