frequency (f1). Using (1517), the normalized line impedance values are ZA 0.84, ZB 1.19 and ZC 1.412 respectively.

ly. Figure 4 shows the photo of the fabricated power divider, which occupies an area of 87 50 mm2. The measured Sparameters date collected from WILTRON37269A network analyzer along with simulated results using HFSS are presented in Figure 5. There is a good agreement between the simulated and measured results with the dual-band operation at 1 and 2.6 GHz. The return loss is 30.39 dB at 1 GHz and 14.90 dB at 2.6 GHz. The measured S21 are 3.02 dB at 1 GHz and 3.43 dB at 2.6 GHz, S31 are 3.08 dB at 1 GHz and 3.45 dB at 2.6 GHz. The isolation between port 2 and 3 is nearly 20 dB at two operating frequencies. As shown in Figure 5, the bandwidth using the proposed structure is 240 MHz, which is enhanced prominently compared with [1, 2].
4. CONCLUSION

ably good radiation characteristics are obtained for 900 MHz and 2.45 GHz RFID bands. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 2046 2048, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24571 Key words: dual-band antenna; slot-coupled; RFID tag antenna 1. INTRODUCTION

This article presents a novel dual-band Wilkinson power divider without additional lumped and distributed elements other than a single resistor. The proposed structure can also enhance bandwidth prominently. The schematic diagram of this power divider and the formulas to determine its parameters have been given. A good agreement between the simulation and measurement has been achieved. This simple topology makes the proposed circuit suitable for dual-band application, which is more demanding at near future.
REFERENCES 1. K.K.M. Cheng and F.L. Wong, A new Wilkinson power divider design for dual band application, IEEE Microwave Wireless Compon Lett 17 (2007), 664 666. 2. M.J. Park and B. Lee, A dual-band Wilkinson power divider, IEEE Microwave Wireless Compon Lett 18 (2008), 85 87. 3. K.K.M. Cheng and C. Law, A novel approach to the design and implementation of dual-band power divider, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 56 (2008), 487 492. 4. Cong Feng, Gang Zhao, Xu-Feng Liu, and Fu-Shun Zhang, A novel dual-frequency unequal Wilkinson power divider, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 50 (2008), 16951699. 5. Lei Wu, Zengguang Sun, Hayattin Yilmaz and Manfred Berroth, A dual-frequency Wilkinson power divider, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 54 (2006), 278 284. 6. Y. Shin and B. Lee, Dual-band Wilkinson power divider with shifted output ports, IEEE Microwave Wireless Compon Lett 18 (2008), 443 445. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Radio frequency identication (RFID) of objects or people has become very popular in many applications across industry, distribution logistics, manufacturing companies, and postal services [1]. Tag antenna is one of the important components in RFID systems, which is used to transmit or receive signal in a tag. Most RFID systems operate at ISM band. Some work at UHF band such as 920 925 MHz (China), 952954 MHz (Japan), 868 870 MHz (Europe), and 902928 MHz (USA), etc. To communicate with tags from different countries, several techniques, such as using thicker substrates [2], resonant aperture [3], coupled resonators [4], or reactive loading [5], have been suggested to broaden the antenna bandwidth or obtain dual-band operation. A novel design approach of a dual-band dipole antenna is proposed in [6]. With the insertion of a coupled slot structure to the dipole antenna operating at 910 MHz, the antenna can also cover the 2.45 GHz frequency band. To reduce the length of the antenna, a compacted structure is explored in this article. Compared with the structure proposed in [6], the antenna proposed here is 10 mm shorter in length, while it still maintains good performances. By properly choosing the dimension of a coupled slot on a dipole antenna, dual-band and tunable impedance bandwidth characteristics for both 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz RFID tag applications can be achieved. The proposed antenna satises the 10 dB return loss characteristics from 840 to 940 MHz (11%) and from 2.26 to 2.56 GHz (12%) applications, respectively.
2. ANTENNA DESIGN

A photograph of the proposed antenna is shown in Figure 1 and its conguration is illustrated in Figure 2. The antenna consists of a dipole element and a slot-coupled structure for dual-band operation. The basic structure of the designed antenna is a symmetrical dipole with feed terminals. Coupled slots with lengths of L2, L3, and L4 are placed inside a dipole antenna of length L1. A numer-

A COMPACT SLOT-COUPLED DUALBAND RFID TAG ANTENNA

Rui-Hua Zeng and Qing-Xin Chu School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Peoples Republic of China; Corresponding author: qxchu@scut.edu.cn Received 27 November 2008 ABSTRACT: A slot-coupled dipole antenna is presented for dual-band passive radio frequency identication (RFID) tag application. A structure using a slot-coupled feed is explored to achieve dual-band operation. The proposed antenna satises the 10 dB return loss characteristics from 840 to 940 MHz (11%) for ISO 18000-6 and from 2.26 to 2.56 GHz (12%) for ISO 18000-4 applications, respectively. The simulated and measured return loss results are in good agreement. Also reasonFigure 1 Photograph of the proposed antenna. [Color gure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com]

Figure 2

The conguration of the proposed antenna

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Figure 3 The surface current distribution of the proposed antenna: (a) at 910 MHz, (b) at 2.45 GHz. [Color gure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com]

ical simulation estimates that the phase difference between the current at the end of the dipole element and that of the coupled slot section of length L2 is about 180. The surface current distribution at 910 MHz and 2.45 GHz is shown in Figure 3. It shows that each of them operates as an approximated half-wave dipole antenna with centre feeding. The dipole element operates at UHF band, meanwhile the coupled slot section operates at 2.45 GHz band. Accordingly, the length of L1 and L2 shoule be about half of the wavelength of respective resonant frequency. It is found that as the length of coupled slot section is increased, the resonant frequency of the upper band is shifted toward the low frequency region. Figure 4 shows the relationship between the resonant frequency and the length L2. We can see that the upper band resonant frequency is gradually reduced as L2 increases, while the lower band almost keeps unchanged. Figure 5 shows how the length S affects the return loss characteristics. From Figure 5, we can see that the upper band resonant frequency is reduced from 2.58 to 2.13 GHz by increasing the length S from 0.5 to 3 mm, while the lower band keeps unchanged. Figure 6 shows the return loss characteristics when length d is varied. Obviously, the characteristics in each band nearly keeps unchanged. To determine the detailed design parameters for the given structure, the tag antenna is optimized to operate at the frequency bands of ISO 18000-6 and ISO 18000-4. Optimal design parameters are as following: L1 134 mm, L2 22 mm, L3 17 mm, L4 24 mm, W 15 mm, W1 W2 5 mm, S d 1 mm, Sfeed 2 mm. The antenna is fabricated on a FR4 substrate with 1.6 mm thickness and permittivity r 4.4.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 5

The return loss characteristics when length S is varied

VSWR 2 at the UHF band of the designed antenna reaches 11% (840 940 MHz), which is narrower than the 18% (840 1.01 GHz) predicted during simulation. And the measured bandwidth reaches 12% (2.26 2.56 GHz) at the microwave band, which is a little broader than the simulated result 11% (2.312.59 GHz). The discrepancies are mainly because of the fabrication accuracy and

Figure 6

The return loss characteristics when length d is varied

Figure 7 shows simulated and measured return loss characteristics of the proposed antenna. The measured impedance bandwidth for

Figure 4

The return loss characteristics when length L2 is varied

Figure 7 Simulated and measured return loss characteristics of proposed antenna

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the SMA soldering before measurement. The proposed design has sufcient bandwidth to cover the RFID system requirement for both 18000-6 and ISO 18000-4 standards. Agreement between the experiment and simulation is generally good. Figure 8 shows the simulated far-eld radiation patterns at 910 MHz and 2.45 GHz for the proposed antenna. Almost omnidirectional patterns in the H-plane are observed for both operation frequencies. Figure 9 shows the simulated peak antenna gain for frequencies across the operating bands. The range of antenna gain is about 2.14 2.23 dBi at ISO 18000-6 band and 5.35.7 dBi at ISO 18000-4 band, respectively.
4. CONCLUSION

A compact slot-coupled dipole antenna with dual-band performance has been designed and implemented. With the insertion of a coupled slot structure to the dipole antenna operating at 910 MHz, the proposed antenna can also cover the 2.45 GHz frequency band. This design is not only suitable for use in ISO 18000-6 (910

Figure 9

The simulated antenna gain

MHz) but also applicable to ISO 18000-4 (2.45 GHz) RFID systems. With low prole, low cost, and small size, the antenna is mechanically robust and easy to fabricate. Moreover, it also has good impedance bandwidth and radiation pattern characteristics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work is partly supported by the Science Funds of China (No.U0635004) and (No.60571056) and the Science Funds of Guangdong (No.07118061).

REFERENCES 1. K. Rinkenzeller, RFID Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, UK, 2003. 2. W. Chen, K.F. Lee, and R.Q Lee. Input impedance of coaxially fed rectangular microstrip antenna on electrically thick substrate, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 6 (1993), 387390. 3. S.D. Targonski, R.B. Waterhouse, and D.M. Pozar, Design of wideband aperture-stacked patch microstrip antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag 46 (1998), 12451251. 4. F. Croq and D.M. Pozar, Multifrequency operation of microstrip antennas using aperture coupled parallel resonators, IEEE Trans Antennas Propag 40 (1992), 13671374. 5. H. Nakano and K. Vichien, Dual-frequency square patch antenna with a rectangular notch, Electron Lett 25 (1989), 10671068. 6. S. Jeon, Y. Yu, and J. Choi, Dual-band slot-coupled dipole antenna for 900 MHz and 2.45 GHz RFID tag application. Electron Lett 42 (2006), 1259 1260. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Figure 8 (a) The simulated far-eld radiation pattern at 910 MHz (b) The simulated far-eld radiation pattern at 2.45 GHz

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