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A Miniature Chip Antenna Design for a Passive UHF RFID Tag to Be Built in a Portable Device
Yu-Shu Lin, Hsien-Wen Liu, Kuo-Hsien Wu, and Chang-Fa Yang Department of Electrical Engineering National Taiwan University of Science and Technology Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract In this paper, a miniature antenna for a passive UHF RFID tag is designed, which
may be built in a portable device. Matching techniques for a Gen2 tag IC are employed to enhance the readable distance of the tag for long-range reading purposes, where quasi-lumped and lumped elements are used to match the chip antenna to the tag IC having complex input impedance. A commercial simulator, HFSSTM is used to analyze the performance of the antenna. Also, measurements in an anechoic chamber of the RFID education and research center at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology are performed to evaluate the readable range of the chip tag, which is more than 5 m for a reader with an EIRP equal to 4 W. The chip antenna operating in the 900 MHz RFID band proposed here has dimensions of only 10 9.5 0.8 mm3 . Thus, this miniature tag may be exibly built in a portable device to allow long-range reading. 1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, Radio Frequency Identication (RFID) has been developed for many applications, such as supply chain managements, retail store applications, etc. For UHF passive RFID systems, the passive tags need to have good impedance matching to achieve ecient power transfer between the tag IC and antenna. Usually, tag antennas in ordinary half-wave dipole forms were designed [1 6]. In this paper, a miniature chip antenna having a size of only 10 9.5 0.8 mm3 for the UHF RFID passive tag is presented, which can be easily built in a portable device. An impedance matching approach by using quasi-lumped components is also investigated and is compared with that by applying lumped elements. A commercial simulator, HFSSTM [7] has been employed to analyze the electrical characteristics of the tag antenna and quasi-lumped elements.
2. RESULTS

As shown in Fig. 1, a miniature chip tag operating in the RFID UHF band is proposed here, which has antenna dimensions of only 10 9.5 0.8 mm3 . To have a low cost design, this tag antenna is fabricated on an FR4 substrate with a relative permittivity r = 4.4 and loss tangent = 0.02. Performance of the proposed tag antenna having an input impedance of 26+j3 is demonstrated in Fig. 2, where a 100 48 mm2 test board is used here. The input impedance of the Monza Gen2 tag IC we have used is equivalent to that of an RC series circuit with R = 33 ohm and C = 1.58 pF. To achieve a conjugated match with this tag IC, as shown in Fig. 3(a), a lumped inductance of 18 nH is serially connected between the proposed antenna and tag IC. Also, another matching circuit, composed of two compact quasi-lumped elements, is applied to obtain the conjugated match, as shown in Fig. 3(b). This quasi-lumped circuit consists of a series inductance and a shunt inductance, where the equivalent values of the inductances are extracted to be 12.3 nH and 12.5 nH, respectively.

Figure 1: Geometry of the proposed miniature chip tag antenna.

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Fig. 4 shows the measured input impedances and reections of the lumped and quasi-lumped designs for the proposed chip antenna. The quasi-lumped design has a wider bandwidth in the RFID UHF band.

(a)

(b)

Figure 2: The performance of the proposed passive tag antenna. (a) Return loss; (b) Simulated far-eld radiation pattern at 922 MHz.

(a)

(b)

Figure 3: Congurations of the lumped and quasi-lumped matching circuits. (a) Lumped circuit with L1 = 8 mm, L2 = 11.75 mm, L3 = 1.95 mm, L4 = 2.25 mm, L5 = 7.2 mm and L6 = 4 mm; (b) Quasi-lumped circuit with L7 = 4 mm and L8 = 4 mm.

The readable range of the tag was tested in an antenna measurement anechoic chamber, as shown in Fig. 5. A transmitting horn antenna with a gain Gt was fed by an RFID reader via a connecting cable with loss Lc . The proposed tag antenna, attached on a Styrofoam, was oriented to obtain the maximum power from the reader antenna. Since RF charging of the passive tag by the reader is the critical part for a success reading, the maximum readable range for a given EIRP can be determined by the following formula [6]: rmax = d EIRP Pmin Gt Lc (1)

where d is the distance between the tag and the transmitting antenna, Pmin is the minimum power of the reader to be able to read the tag, Gt = 5.7 dBi and Lc = 1.5 dB at 922 MHz for the chamber system. In those measurements, d was xed at 3.6m, and the measured Pmin for lumped and quasi-lumped designs were individually obtained to be 29 dBm and 28 dBm. Therefore, if the EIRP of the reader is set to 4 W, the maximum readable ranges with the lumped and quasi-lumped

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designs will be 5 m and 5.5 m, respectively. Besides, read-range experiments were also performed in a corridor to compare with those from chamber measurements, as listed in Table 1. Due to multi-path contributions, the distances measured in the corridor were longer in this test case.
Table 1: Experimental results of readable range measurements.
Readable range Matching circuit Lumped elements Quasi-lumped elements Maximum range in the corridor 5.8 m 6m Maximum range in the anechoic chamber 5m 5.5 m

(a)

(b)

Figure 4: Measured input impedances and return losses of the proposed tag antenna with the lumped and quasi-lumped matching circuits. (a) Input impedance; (b) Return loss.

(a)

(b)

Figure 5: The readable range measurements in an anechoic chamber. (a) Measurement setup; (b) Chamber environment. 3. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have proposed and analyzed a miniature chip antenna with lumped and quasilumped matching circuits for passive UHF RFID tag applications. The performance of the proposed tag antenna was examined through the readable range measurements in an anechoic chamber. The

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compact chip tag with either quasi-lumped or lumped matching circuits can have a readable range more than 5 m with a 4 W EIRP reader.
REFERENCES

1. Rao, K. V. S., P. V. Nikitin, and S. F. Lam, Antenna design for UHF RFID tags: A review and a practical application, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., Vol. 53, No. 12, 38703876, Dec. 2005. 2. X. Qing and N. yang, A folded dipole antenna for RFID, Proc. IEEE AP-S Int. Symp. Dig., 97100, Jun. 2004. 3. Ahn, J., H. Jang, H. Moon, J.-W. Lee, and B. Lee, Inductively coupled compact RFID tag antenna at 910 MHz with near-isotropic radar cross-section (RCS) patterns, IEEE Ante. and Wireless Propag. Lett., Vol. 6, 518520, Jun. 2007. 4. Son, H.-W. and C.-S. Pyo, Design of RFID tag antennas using an inductively coupled feed, Electronics Lett., Vol. 41, No. 18, 994996, Sept. 2005. 5. Liu, Y.-W., S.-Y. Chen, and P. Hsu, Short-ended coplanar strip antenna for UHF RFID tags, Proc. IEEE AP-S Int. Symp. Dig., 17731776, Jun. 2007. 6. Kurokawa, K., Power waves and the scattering matrix, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., Vol. 13, No. 3, 194202, Mar. 1965. 7. HFSS, Users guide 9.2, Ansoft Corp., USA.