An Impulse UWB Radio System for Remotely-Powered Wireless MemoryTag Applications

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies have been used for decades in a wide variety of applications, e.g. asset tracking, access management and mobile payment. The evolution of memory and radio technologies is enabling development of RFID tags towards wireless memory tags (WMT) with high storage capacity (> 1 gigabit). This work contributes to the research and development of WMT technologies and applications. The main objectives of this work are to show the feasibility of remotely-powered WMTs and that the required host functionality is integrable to today's mobile devices. A key enabler for the technology is the air-interface that supports wireless powering of tags, datarates above 100 Mbit/s and flexible usage needed for the new applications. Thus, an additional objective has been to develop a system with a high performance air-interface and to justify the chosen approach with an implementation showing the performance and feasibility of the system. The scientific merit of the thesis lies in the novel methods and the strong contributions made to the design and development of the new dual-band radio system which overcomes the traditional challenges of single-band RFID systems. In the work an impulse UWB transceiver operating at 7.9 GHz center frequency has been developed. The transceiver utilizes one single super-regenerative oscillator for bi-directional communication. Additionally, synchronization schemes based on the use of a continuous wave signal (on UHF or HF band) for the synchronization of the UWB link have been developed and tested. Finally, the feasibility of the system has been confirmed by designing, developing and testing four system implementations.