RESEARCH OF NANOSCALE MOSFET PARAMETERS IMPACT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF ENERGY CONVERTERS FOR WIRELESS PASSIVE DEVICES
Abstract
Wireless microdevices are widely adopted in Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT). Among them, passive devices have a special
place, since they haven’t constant power supply (battery energy storage). Passive devices (passive
RFID tags, sensors with possibility to receive and transmit the data) are cheaper and more compact
than their active analogs, their lifetime is higher, and they can be applied in some applications,
in which using of active tags is not always possible, e.g. in medical implants. However passive
devices have to receive the energy for operation from the outside through RF radiation – from
base station (reader) or harvesting energy from the environment. For conversion this energy to
power supply voltage of passive microdevice IC, voltage rectifiers and multipliers are used. The
purpose of this work is research of impact on output voltage by parameters of nanoscale diodeconnected
MOSFETs, which perform functions of rectifiers in the energy converters. The comparison
of different voltage rectifier configurations, based on nanoscale diode-connected MOSFETs,
was made based on Tanner EDA software simulation results. The current-voltage characteristics
of diode-connected MOSFETs were obtained for 90 nm, 65 nm and 45 nm CMOS technologies.
The impact of transistor threshold voltage and its sizes (relation of transistor width to length) on
output voltage of single-stage multiplier for different technologies, input voltage amplitudes and
load resistances was investigated. It was shown that at certain values of threshold voltage maximums
of the output voltage are observed. The optimal value of threshold voltage is shifted to low
values region with load current rising. The obtained results show the possibility of the multipliers
operation in transistor subthreshold region, which allows to ensure the possibility of operation at
low input voltages and fulfills the condition of wireless passive microdevices functioning at significant
distance from base station or in case of obtaining energy for supplying from the environment.
The results of the research can be useful in the design of wireless passive microdevices.
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