Compact metallic RFID tag antennas with a loop-fed method

Several compact, low profile and metal-attachable RFID tag antennas with a loop-fed method are proposed for UHF RFID systems. The structure of the proposed antennas comprise of two parts: (1) The radiator part consists of two shorted patches, which can be treated as two quarter-wave patch antennas or a cavity. (2) A small loop printed on the paper serves as the feeding structure. The small loop provides the needed inductance for the tag and is connected to the RFID chip. The input impedance of the antenna can be easily adjusted by changing loop dimensions. The antenna has the compact size of 80 mm × 25 mm × 3.5 mm, and the realized gain about -3.6 dB. The measured results show that these antennas have good performance when attached onto metallic surfaces. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Passive UHF RFID Tag with Multiple Sensing Capabilities

This work presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a printed radio frequency identification tag in the ultra-high frequency band with multiple sensing capabilities. This passive tag is directly screen printed on a cardboard box with the aim of monitoring the packaging conditions during the different stages of the supply chain. This tag includes a commercial force sensor and a printed opening detector. Hence, the force applied to the package can be measured as well as the opening of the box can be detected. The architecture presented is a passive single-chip RFID tag. An electronic switch has been implemented to be able to measure both sensor magnitudes in the same access without including a microcontroller or battery. Moreover, the chip used here integrates a temperature sensor and, therefore, this tag provides three different parameters in every reading.This work was partially funded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia under Projects CTQ2009-14428-C02-01 and CTQ2009-14428-C02-02 and the Junta de Andalucía (Proyecto de Excelencia P10-TIC-5997), Spain. This project was partially supported by European Regional Development Funds (ERDF)

Inkjet Printing of Paper-Based Wideband and High Gain Antennas

This thesis represents a major contribution to wideband and high gain inkjet-printed antennas on paper. This work includes the complete characterization of the inkjet printing process for passive microwave devices on paper substrate as well as several ultra-wideband and high gain antenna designs. The characterization work includes the electrical characterization of the permittivity and loss tangent for paper substrate through 10 GHz, ink conductivity data for variable sintering conditions, and minimum feature sizes obtainable by today’s current inkjet processes for metallic nanoparticles. For the first time ever, inkjet-printed antennas are demonstrated that operate over the entire UWB band and demonstrate gains up to 8dB. This work also presents the first fractal-based inkjet-printed antennas with enhanced bandwidth and reduced production costs, and a novel slow wave log periodic dipole array which shows minimizations of 20% in width over conventional log periodic antennas