Design Of UHF RFID Tag Research Articles

Design and analysis of flexible embroidered UHF-RFID tag on facemask for IoT applications using characteristics mode analysis

This work presents an ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tag embroidered on a face mask for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The tag is designed and optimized to operate within the entire US RFID band of 902–928 MHz using characteristic mode analysis (CMA). A Mickey Mouse (MM) shaped radiation element is analyzed by testing three resonating modes at frequency of 900 MHz. Additionally, two dipoles are introduced to achieve the optimal conjugate match with a passive RFID chip (Alien Higgs H3), which exhibits an impedance of 27-200j at the desired frequency. A simulation of the voxel head model has also been carried out to verify the specific absorption rate (SAR), which provides SAR <1.43 W/kg. The proposed tag is embroidered on a cotton fabric facemask with a dielectric constant of 1.143 using conductive thread with a resistance of 28 O/ft. This tag features a good impedance match in US RFID band along with gain of 2.06 dB and a 37% reduction in size as compared to the previous version. Furthermore, it provides a read range of 3 m for an off-body scenario and 2.5 m for an on-body scenario. The proposed wearable facemask tag has potential applications for various real-life applications.

Complementarily Coupled C-Shaped Microstrip Patches With Wide-Range Frequency Tuning Capability for Metal-Applicable UHF RFID Tag Design

A single-layer patch antenna, which is constructed using two complementarily placed C-shaped patches, has been proposed for designing a metal-mountable tag with a wide range of frequency tuning capability. The two patches are closely coupled for generating sufficient antenna reactance, which is in turn employed as a tuning mechanism. With only the employment of this tuning mechanism, the tag’s resonant frequency can be successfully tuned over a broad range covering 920 MHz–1.18 GHz without using any other external lumped components, shorting stubs, or vias. Good read performance is sustainable as the tuning can be performed without changing the antenna structure much. A transmission line model has also been constructed for the design and characterization processes. The proposed tag is compact ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.154\lambda \times 0.154\lambda \times 0.010\lambda$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), and it can be read from ~9 m with 3.28 W effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP).

UHF RFID Tag Design Using Theory of Characteristics Modes for Platform-Tolerant and Harsh Metallic Environments

This paper presents a wideband, long-range RFID tag antenna design with platform tolerant features using characteristic mode analysis (CMA). The proposed design consists of a two-layer structure, that are separated by an air gap. The upper layer consists of T-match and dual loop-based meandered antenna optimized for achieving long read range characteristics in free space/low permittivity dielectrics. The second layer consists of multi-resonant strips printed on a grounded substrate carefully designed using CMA for producing multi-resonant modes in the required UHF RFID band. The multi-resonant strips help in achieving wide bandwidth and isolation between different environment surfaces. This tag antenna provides a wide bandwidth ranging from 900 &#x2013; 940 MHz that covers both the US UHF RFID band (902 &#x2013; 928 MHz) and the upper European UHF RFID band (915 &#x2013; 921 MHz). Moreover, this design achieved a read range of 14.7 m in free space, 14 m on a metal plate, and 13 m on wood, and glass. Furthermore, the proposed antenna was also tested in harsh metal environments such as car number plates and cargo metallic containers. Therefore, the proposed tag can be used for tagging metallic containers, wood containers, and other harsh platforms for cargo management, Asset tracking, supply chain visibility, and Internet of Things (IoT) Applications.

Improved UHF-RFID Tag Design and Middleware Implementation for Effective Site Management and Access Control at Construction Site

Effective site management and access control are useful aspects to implement at the construction industry. In particular, monitoring personnel, construction materials, and equipment is considered predominant elements at these sites as they constitute more than half of the total project cost. Thus, to provide accurate and timely information of man/materials, UHF-RFID technology integrated with Middleware acts as a pioneering solution for real-time data monitoring. This work develops a new approach to implement the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) solution through Middleware integrated with the UHF-RFID system. To design a UHF RFID tag, we propose a new platform tolerant Artificial Magnetic Surface (AMC) meta surface integrated tag for tracking man/material at the construction site. The novelties of the proposed tag lie in its improved radiation characteristics and stable high read range performance on different items. The designed tag was fabricated and tested experimentally in a real outdoor scenario by placing it on different items such as personnel and metal objects. At the same time, we developed UHF-RFID system integrated web application through Middleware to provide digital worksite visibility for access control and on/off-site management. Thus, the developed system will act as an automated tool to remotely fetch the information from different working zones at the construction site.

Design of autonomous multi-sensing passive UHF RFID tag for greenhouse monitoring

When it comes to management modernization of greenhouses, UHF RFID technology, with its passive character and low-cost and power consumption, presents a very efficient solution. To this end, an EPC global C3 SL900A sensor tag is enhanced by integrating energy harvesting and multi-sensing capabilities. The challenge of using only the fundamental carrier as an energy-harvesting source without the need for other auxiliary energy or battery source is considered and evaluated. The developed architecture uses a deep power consumption management strategy and operates autonomously under full passive mode for sensing the required parameters in the grown monitoring process. This architecture does not integrate any chemical components or batteries, making it safe and more suitable for agriculture-related applications. It can also be considered as an auto-adaptive data-rate sensor device, such as the rate change according to the amount of harvested energy. Furthermore, this architecture can write all sensors’ data simultaneously into the tag IC user memory. This latter is easily accessible by any standard UHF RFID reader.

Top down design of UHF RFID tag based on SystemC

Top down design of UHF RFID tag based on SystemC

Bowtie-Shaped Folded Patch Antenna With Split Ring Resonators for UHF RFID Tag Design

A compact UHF tag antenna, which consists of a bowtie-shaped folded patch antenna and two split ring resonators (SRRs), is proposed for on-metal applications. This antenna is made by using a flexible substrate and it is electrically small, having a circuit size of 40 $\text {mm} \times 40\,\,\text {mm} \times 3.18$ mm ( $0.122\lambda \times 0.122\lambda \times 0.010\lambda$ ). The SRRs introduce additional capacitance and inductance to the tag antenna’s impedance for achieving a conjugate match with the chip’s impedance. It is also found that the SRRs improve the radiation efficiency of the proposed tag antenna. The proposed tag antenna is able to achieve a far read distance of 9.5 m on metal when tested at EIRP power of 4 W. Most importantly, the resonant frequency of the proposed tag is stable and it is not affected much by the size and curvature of the backing metallic object.

UHF RFID Tag Based on Modified Dihedral Corner for Enhanced Read Range and Broadband Operation

This paper presents the design and development of a novel UHF RFID tag which exhibits enhanced read range over the entire UHF RFID band of 860-930MHz. This novel UHF RFID tag consists of an antenna based on modified dihedral corner with an embedded double T-match and a Murata LXMS 31ACNA010 chip attached to the terminals of the antenna. Measured read range variations over the azimuth and elevation angular ranges show enhanced read range over wide angular ranges as compared to conventional RFID tags.

Design of secure UHF RFID tag by binding object dielectric permittivity

ABSTRACTAntennas can always be affected by the attached materials. Such a property is here integrated with RFID technology of designing a passive RFID tag which is sensitive to a chosen object material. A good sensing ability will help the tag bonding up with the chosen material, which will benefit material security a lot. To achieve a high tag‐object bonding sensitivity, a fragmented‐type tag is introduced here. When permittivity of attached object material changes a little bit, readability of the tag will degrade rapidly. The sensitive properties are investigated by simulated and articulated experimentations. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:318–323, 2017

BROADBAND UHF RFID TAG ANTENNA FOR BIO-MONITORING

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a broadband UHF RFID tag for bio-monitoring applications. The proposed tag is realized with a thin FR4 substrate of 200 µm, which can be considered as flexible. It shows good performances both in free space and placed on human body. For instance, in free space, the tag can be read at 14 m in the UHF RFID band and at an average distance of 4.6 m when it is placed on the human body. The overall tag size is only 80 mm × 50 mm × 200 µm.

Design and implementation of a passive UHF RFID tag with a temperature and process compensation oscillator

A fully integrated passive UHF RFID tag chip compatible with ISO18000-6B protocol is pre- sented. In order to save die area, an all CMOS transistor regulator is adopted. An NMOS based traditional Dickson rectifier is employed with the advantage of circuit simplicity. An ultra-low power ring oscillator with temperature and process compensation is designed to guarantee the accuracy of the clock, which has a direct impact on the accuracy of backscatter link frequency (BLF). By utilizing several low power design approaches, a low power baseband processor is achieved. The whole tag chip is fabricated in TSMC 0.18m CMOS technology and the chip size is 730m × 605m. Measurement results show that the total power consumption of the tag is about 7W with a sensitivity of −13.1 dBm and an operational range of about 7.5 m under 4 W effective isotropic radiated (EIRP) power, and the accuracy of BLF is within ±10%. With the long operational range, the tag is suitable for many commercial applications, such as supply-chain and logistics managements as well as location sensing system.

Application of Gbest-guided artificial bee colony algorithm to passive UHF RFID tag design

In this paper, new planar spiral antennas with meander lines and loads for passive Radiofrequency identification tag application at ultra-high-frequency band are designed and optimized using the global best (gbest)-guided Artificial Bee Colony (GABC) algorithm. The GABC is an improved Artificial Bee Colony algorithm, which includes gbest solution information into the search equation to improve the exploitation. The optimization goals are antenna size minimization, gain maximization, and conjugate matching. The antenna dimensions were optimized and evaluated in conjunction with commercial software FEKO. GABC is compared with other popular algorithms. The optimization results produced show that GABC is a powerful optimization algorithm that can be efficiently applied to tag antenna design problems.

Unconventional UHF RFID Tags with Sensing and Computing Capabilities

The design of fully-passive UHF RFID tags preserving cost-effectiveness, yet supplying augmented capabilities, represents an ambitious and stimulating challenge, as such devices would pave the way to a large class of applications where identification, computation, automatic cognition, and wireless sensing are required. In this work, two solutions are proposed. The former, named RAMSES, is optimized for RFID-based sensing and relies on a novel approach exploiting a new-generation I2C-UHF RFID chip. RAMSES is able to write sensor data into the EPC and communicate up to 5 m of distance from a conventional UHF RFID Class-1 Generation-2 (Gen2) reader. The latter solution, named SPARTACUS, renounces part of this long operating range in exchange for additional computing capabilities enabling an increased interaction with RFID readers. SPARTACUS represents the first example in literature of RFID device embedding sensing/actuation functionalities, distributed computation, and fully bidirectional communication with the reader. Satisfactory operating range, sensing, computation, data storage, and cost-effectiveness are the main strengths making the proposed devices definitely suitable for a wide array of novel and unconventional RFID applications.

An Approach for the Design of Passive UHF-RFID Tags Mounted on Optical Discs

In this paper, an innovative design strategy for UHF-RFID tags mounted on optical discs (such as DVDs) is presented. By using the metal layer of the disc as the main radiating element, it is possible to overcome the severe limitations of the existing tags for disc identification in terms of read range and bandwidth. The design and synthesis process, based on the proposed circuit model of the tag, is described. A worldwide UHF-RFID tag prototype, for direct mounting on a DVD disc, is designed and fabricated. The measured read range demonstrates that the presented method drastically improves the performance within the whole UHF-RFID band (840-930 MHz), in comparison to the DVD tags found in the available literature.

Design and implementation of an ultra-low power passive UHF RFID tag

This paper presents a fully integrated passive UHF RFID tag chip complying with the ISO18000-6B protocol. The tag chip includes an RF/analog front-end, a baseband processor, and a 512-bit EEPROM memory. To improve power conversion efficiency, a Schottky barrier diode based rectifier is adopted. A novel voltage reference using the peaking current source is discussed in detail, which can meet the low-power, low-voltage requirement while retaining circuit simplicity. Most of the analog blocks are designed to work under sub-1 V to reduce power consumption, and several practical methods are used to further reduce the power consumption of the baseband processor. The whole tag chip is implemented in a TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS process with a die size of 800 × 800 μm2. Measurement results show that the total power consumption of the tag chip is only 7.4 μW with a sensitivity of −12 dBm.

Temporary On-Skin Passive UHF RFID Transfer Tag

A passive UHF RFID tag design is presented in the form of a transfer patch similar to a temporary tattoo that is mountable directly onto the skin surface. The transfer tag is suitable for monitoring of people over time in mission critical and secure environments. The antenna reactance is first calculated to conjugate match the measured RFID chip reactance and then full wave simulation is used to design the tag with good performance on a human flesh model. Finally the tag read range is measured on different parts of a volunteer's body and compared to simulated read range values for the entire RFID bands.

A Methodology for the Design of Frequency and Environment Robust UHF RFID Tags

A methodology for the design of frequency and environment “robust” UHF RFID Tags is proposed and applied for the automatic generation of tag antennas. This is an automated process of antenna generation mainly associated with a Genetic Algorithm optimizer. Original antenna topologies are generated and selected automatically according to an evolutionary algorithm. The efficiency property is implemented as a set of constraints and integrated in the cost functions of the design process. Moreover, the proposed methodology is fully automatic and avoids classical tedious simulation steps. The methodology is applied to design “robust” RFID tags, under constraints of size, UHF frequency bands and environment characteristics. The design of efficient tags showing good performance for the worldwide UHF band is demonstrated. Some designs have been realized and measured in an anechoic chamber owing to an experimental set up dedicated to RFID communication characterization. Good agreement between simulation and measurement is observed.