Design of an RFID-Based Battery-Free, Programmable Sensing Platform

This paper presents the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), which is a programmable battery-free sensing and computational platform designed to explore sensor-enhanced radio frequency identification (RFID) applications. WISP uses a 16-bit ultralow-power microcontroller to perform sensing and computation while exclusively operating from harvested RF energy. Sensors that have successfully been integrated into the WISP platform to date include temperature, ambient light, rectified voltage, and orientation. The microcontroller encodes measurements into an Electronic Product Code (EPC) Class 1 Generation 1 compliant ID and dynamically computes the required 16-bit cyclical redundancy checking (CRC). Finally, WISP emulates the EPC protocol to communicate the ID to the RFID reader. To the authors' knowledge, WISP is the first fully programmable computing platform that can operate using power transmitted from a long-range (UHF) RFID reader and communicate arbitrary multibit data in a single response packet.