Low-Power Data Driven Symbol Decoder for a UHF Passive RFID Tag

One of the significant sources of power consumption of a conventional UHF passive RFID tag is the input data decoding procedure. These tags use a high frequency clocked symbol decoder block to implement the decoding process. This paper proposes a low-area low-power data driven decoder that eliminates the need for a high frequency oscillator, counter and an explicit clock, which are generally used by the conventional symbol RFID tag decoders. The proposed data driven unit consisting of a decoder including a CRC-16 block has been designed and implemented. The post-layout simulation results of the proposed symbol decoder clearly show that there is a significant reduction in power consumption when compared to a conventional decoder unit of a UHF passive tag that was also designed using the same tools and libraries.