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The battery-less reference design of RF430CL330h

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: RF430CL330H, RF430FRL152H, TRF7970A, TIDA-00217

Dear Experts

There is a battery-less reference design of RF430CL330h on the website:
www.ti.com/.../TIDM-RF430-TEMPSENSE

My customer wants to know if it is possible to read the high/low status of a GPIO on RF430CL330h the send the status through RF to a RFID reader without battery?
Is it possible to send out for 20cm? I guess this is difficult.
And also, what is the antenna size? Is that possible smaller than 13x13mm?
Thanks for your comment.

  • Hello Jeffferey,

    The TI Design you linked is for the RF430FRL152H. The TI Design for a battery-less RF430CL330H tag is this one: http://www.ti.com/tool/TIDA-00217

    For your questions:

    1. Yes, this is possible. The RF430CL330H will need to be controlled by a host MCU anyways. This MCU could read the status of the pin and then load an NDEF message into the RF430CL330H which contains that information.
      1. In this sort of application, the MCU and the RF430CL330H would both be powered from the RF field provided by the NFC reader device
      2. The GPIO would not be read until the MCU has received enough power to start up and run the firmware required to do all of this
    2. 20cm would not be possible without using a very high power NFC reader such as what Feig makes. For a battery-less application like this, depending on the size of the tag, the size of the reader antenna, and the amount of output power produced by the RF field, the maximum range could be anywhere from 1-5cm for a typical NFC reader such as the TRF7970A.
    3. I would say since the PCB needs the RF430CL330H, and MCU, and all passives required for both plus field powered operation, a best case form factor would be around 20x20mm. The current board seen in the TIDA-00217 design is 1 inch x 1 inch (25.4mm x 25.4mm), but it does include some test points etc. which are not required though we recommend for easier debugging