Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium Proceedings, Marrakesh, Morocco, Mar.

2023, 2011 1067

RFID Tag Antenna Design on Metallic Surface by Using

Rectangular Micro-strip Feed
Ding-Bing Lin1 , Chao-Chieh Wang1 , I-Tseng Tang2 , and Mau-Phon Houng3
1
Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering
National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan
2
Department of Environment and Energy, National University of Tainan, Tainan, Taiwan
3
Institute of Microelectronics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

Abstract A novel UHF RFID antenna structure that can stick on metallic surface is presented. A printed rectangular antenna by using micro-strip feed structure on system ground
which has the same size as antenna. By using the inductive property of the micro-strip line with
short end to match the capacitive reactance of tag chip, and the performance in free space on
metallic surface was measured. The half-power matching bandwidth (VSWR < 3) of the antenna
in free space was measured to be in the frequency range 914934 MHz. The measured reading
range in free-space is 56 m.
1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has become a popular application
since it provides a convenient identification information, small size, long reading range and fast
reading speed. Numerous papers have been written describing how to construct an antenna for
RFID. A good survey can be found in [1], and a more detailed account is given in [2]. The
operating band of RFID in UHF is mainly from 860 to 960 MHz. When the operating frequency
of RFID rises to microwave region, the antenna design including the impedance matching becomes
more important to enhance the system performance. To provide a better impedance matching
network between an antenna and a tag chip is the way to improve the chip power and maximize
the reading range. As the cost and fabrication requirements, the antenna must directly match to
large capacitive reactance and small resistance of tag chip that different from 50 ohm. Because of
chip impedance with high Q, the design of a matched antenna is difficult. T-matching networks
or inductively coupled [3, 4] feed are commonly used for the efficient matching of UHF tags. Most
RFID antennas are currently used to stick on nonmetal material or easy card, but not on metallic
material [57]. Numerous papers have been written describing how to design a RFID tag antenna
on metallic material [810].
In this paper, we propose a novel broadband UHF RFID tag antenna. With the structure of
patch, the input impedance of the proposed antenna is easy to be tuned. On the other hand,
with the structure micro-strip shorted to the ground plane through corresponding shorting strips,
the proposed antenna shows an acceptable performance when the tag antenna is attached to a
metallic surface. The measured half-power bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 121 MHz (13.5%,
830951 MHz).
2. RFID TAG DESIGN

The proposed antenna structure is shown in Fig. 1. The antenna discussed in this paper uses both
rectangular patch and micro-strip to achieve conjugation match. In this study, a 1.6-mm thick
FR4 substrate with relative permittivity (r ) 4.4 and area 66 13 mm2 is considered. On its back
side, a system ground plane with the same size is also printed. The micro-strip line is electrically
shorted to the ground plane through the shorting strips at the end terminal. Optimized design
parameters were found with the following dimensions: L = 66 mm, W = 13 mm, L1 = 14.5 mm,
L2 = 32.5 mm, W1 = 0.9 mm, W2 = 3 mm, W3 = 1 mm, W4 = 2 mm. The chip conforms to the
EPC global Class-1 Gen-2 specification and provides state-of-the-art performance for a broad range
of UHF RFID tagging applications, whose input impedance was 11 j131 Ohms equal to that of
an RC parallel circuit with R = 1.5 k and C = 1.58 pF at the frequency of 925 MHz. The conjugate
matching between the antenna and the micro-strip can be tuned by adjusting the perimeter and
the position of the RFID Tag chip. In such a way, a good broadband characteristic can be attained
for the antenna.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 1: (a) Geometry of the printed UHF RFID antenna stick on metallic surface operation in the 925 MHz.
(b) Dimensions of the metal pattern of the UHF RFID antenna.

(a)

(b)

Figure 2: (a) Resistance of the proposed antenna for variation in L2 . (b) Reactance of the proposed antenna
for variation in L2 .

(a)

(b)

Figure 3: (a) Resistance of the proposed antenna for variation in W4 . (b) Reactance of the proposed antenna
for variation in W4 .

Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium Proceedings, Marrakesh, Morocco, Mar. 2023, 2011 1069

Figure 4: Calculated S11 characteristics of the proposed antenna.

3. SIMULATION AND COMPARISON

Ansoft HFSS software [11], FEKO EM Software [12] and Advantest E8362B Network Analyzer were
utilized for simulations and measurements. Figs. 2(a), (b) shows the input impedance characteristics
of the proposed antenna and the position of the micro-strip L2 is decided to be 32.5 mm for achieving
the resistance and reactance of about 13 + j131 ohms as shown. Furthermore, Figs. 3(a), (b) show
that the required resistance of the tag antenna can be obtained by adjusting W4 . Fig. 4 shows
the return loss of the antenna. The half-power bandwidth (return loss, 20.3 dB) of the proposed
antenna in measurement is 121 MHz (13.5%), from 830 to 951 MHz.
4. CONCLUSIONS

A novel RFID tag antenna is proposed for the UHF RFID band. The structures of the rectangular
patch and micro-strip shorted to ground plane are employed to help getting broadband characteristics and acceptable performance on metallic objects. The return loss performance and the
maximum readable distances of the proposed antenna both show that the proposed antenna can
work not only in air but also on metallic objects within the UHF RFID band and the maximum
readable distances are over 6.2 m.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan under grant NSC 99-2220-E027-006 and NSC 99-2515-S-027-001-.
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