IR-UWB-based chipless RFID system

Abstract

This paper presents a chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) system, based on impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) technology. This UWB-RFID system consists of a transmitter, a receiver, two tapered slot antennas, and several chipless tags. Covering the lower UWB frequency band in 3–5 GHz, the transmitter integrated circuit generates signals with high peak-to-peak amplitude of 6.6 V and short pulse duration of 1 ns. The receiver front end consists of amplifiers and filters, with total front-end gain up to 36 dB. This is followed by an equivalent time sampling analog to digital converter to sample the equivalent RF signals directly followed by digital signal processing in MATLAB. The tapered slot antenna has a high and relatively flat gain of 10 dBi. The chipless tag is uniplanar and with a size of 23 × 23 × 0.508 mm3 only. Based on these hardware designs developed in our research group, a novel method is proposed to separate two overlapped time-domain signals. This method, which is experimentally validated in this paper, greatly simplifies the hardware designs, especially the chipless tag. This chipless UWB-RFID system is an excellent candidate to realize a low-cost, low-power, and high-performance system for next-generation RFID applications.