This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES 1 High-Data-Rate Single-Chip Battery-Free Active Millimeter-Wave Identification Tag in 65-nm CMOS Technology Pascal Burasa, Student Member, IEEE, Tarek Djerafi, Member, IEEE, Nicolas G. Constantin, Member, IEEE, and Ke Wu, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—In this paper, a class of high-data-rate battery-free yet active miniature radio-frequency identification tag without any external components (except antenna) operating at millime- ter (mm)-wave frequencies is proposed and demonstrated. This fully embedded tag consists of a recently proposed CMOS-based zero-intermediate-frequency self-oscillating mixer, a high power conversion efficiency mm-wave-to-dc rectifier, and an ultralow- power voltage regulator on a single chip, integrated with ceramic- based antennas. Interconnection between the CMOS die and the antenna is realized using a wire-bonding technique, which is com- pensated and optimized to match the antenna input impedance and also to minimize the wire-bond associated losses at mm fre- quencies. The 10 × 10 mm 2 tag wirelessly harvests its energy from an incoming signal at 24 GHz, receives, and recovers the data sent by reader on an amplitude modulation (AM)-modulated 40-GHz carrier, and transmits its data back to the reader on a 40-GHz carrier, using AM modulation as well. The tag exhibits a bit rate of about 500 kb/s during the reader-to-tag communica- tion and 10 Mb/s during the tag-to-reader communication, solely relying on the rectified energy for powering its operation. To the best of our knowledge, such an mm-wave identification tag at mm-wave frequencies has never been reported in the literature. Index Terms— Battery-free active tag, CMOS, injection- locking, millimeter (mm)-wave identification (MMID), mm-wave radio-frequency identification (RFID), mm-wave VCO, self-oscillating mixer (SOM), self-powered device. I. I NTRODUCTION R ADIO-FREQUENCY identification (RFID), a technol- ogy that is having an increasing impact on our daily life, has been mostly designed and developed at low RF frequencies (below 3 GHz). For many applications where short-range (few centimeters) and low-data-rate communi- cations are sufficient and in some cases even preferable, inductively coupled RFID systems that operate over either low-frequency or high-frequency bands have performed quite well and have been widely used for practical and commercial Manuscript received November 2, 2015; revised February 3, 2016 and May 25, 2016; accepted May 27, 2016. This work was supported in part by the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada and in part by the Fonds de Recherches du Québec-Nature et Technologies (FRQNT). P. Burasa, T. Djerafi, and K. Wu are with the Poly-Grames Research Center, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, QC H3T 1J4, Canada (e-mail: pascal.burasa@polymtl.ca; tarek.djerafi@polymtl.ca; ke.wu@polymtl.ca). N. G. Constantin is with the École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada (e-mail: nicolas.constantin@etsmtl.ca). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMTT.2016.2575826 applications such as security and access control [1]–[4]. On the other hand, in quest for a longer communication range (a few meters), higher data rate, and smaller antenna size, radiative (or far-field coupling or rectification-based) RFID systems operating over ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) and microwave-frequency bands (e.g., 2.4 GHz) have recently attracted much attention in the research and development community. This has been driven by a strong desire to cover numerous highly anticipated applications in connection with the Internet of Things, which will require a countless number of sensors and RFID devices. Typically, over these RF bands, a restricted available bandwidth together with an undesired tag size (mainly dominated by its antenna size) is the main factor that has been impeding the evolution of active RFID technology. As for purely passive RFID tags, they are hurdled by a limited number of bits and also a rather short interacting distance. Overcoming these limitations requires alternative approaches and systems, innovative techniques, and integrated circuits, which allow propelling the RFID technology for oper- ation at millimeter (mm)-wave frequencies. Indeed, the still- emerging mm-wave identification (MMID) technology takes advantage of a much smaller antenna size at these frequencies and also a significantly larger bandwidth (a few gigahertz, for example) available at mm-wave carrier frequencies, which are being considered in the research community for these types of applications (e.g., 35 and 60 GHz). Over these frequency bands, an effective wavelength is on the order of a few millimeters and hence close to a typical semicon- ductor (CMOS) die size. Therefore, it becomes possible to integrate the entire MMID tag circuitry on a single chip. The antenna may either be integrated on the same chip (in the 60-GHz band, in particular) or embedded in the related pack- age [antenna-in-package (AiP)], as illustrated in Fig. 1. Shown in Fig. 1 is our proposed battery-free MMID tag containing an mm-wave transceiver, including mm-wave, analog, and high-speed digital signal processing blocks, which are entirely supplied by ON-chip energy harvesting and power management circuits. The architecture shown in Fig. 2 has recently been proposed in [5] and represents a new generation of high-data- rate miniaturized active RFID technology for a wide range of applications. Some research works in MMID technology have been published in recent years [6]–[9]. However, none of them has demonstrated a functional MMID system using 0018-9480 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.