Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Chipless RFID:
Bar Code of the Future
DIGITAL VISION
December 2010
1527-3342/10/$26.002010 IEEE
87
Clock
RFID
Reader
Global
Network
Data
RFID Tag
Host
Computer
ASIC Design
ASIC
Manufacturing
ASIC Testing
Antenna
Manufacture
Tag Assembly
Conversion to
Label/Package
88
December 2010
to design an RFID ASIC with less than 8,000 transistors. Although this will reduce the price of the silicon chip, its miniature size imposes limitations and
further handling costs.
The cost of dividing the wafer, handling the die,
and placing them onto a label remains significant,
even if the cost of the RFID chip were next-to-nothing.
The cost of handling the die increases with the use of
smaller-than-standard chips, simply because the electronics industry is not standardized for them.
Hence, with highly optimized low transistor
count ASICs, implemented assembly processes and
extremely large quantities (over 1 billion) of RFID
chips sold per annum, a minimum cost of US$0.05 is
the reality for chipped RFID tags.
Given the inevitable high cost of silicon chip RFID
tags (when compared to optical bar codes), efforts to
design low-cost RFID tags without the use of traditional silicon ASICs have emerged. These tags, and
therefore systems, are known as chipless RFID systems. The expected cost of chipless RFID tags is below
US$0.01. Most chipless RFID systems use the electromagnetic (EM) properties of materials and/or design
various conductor layouts/shapes to achieve particular EM properties/behavior.
Time-Domain Reflectometry-Based
Chipless Tags
TDR-based chipless RFID tags are interrogated by
sending a signal from the reader in the form of a pulse
and listening to the echoes of the pulse sent by the tag.
A train of pulses is thereby created, which can be used
to encode data.
The advantages of these tags when compared to
chipped tags are low cost, greater reading ranges, and
their applicability in localization/positioning applications. The disadvantages of these tags are the number of bits that can be encoded and high-speed RFID
reader RF front-ends required for generating and
detecting short ultrawideband (UWB) pulses.
Various RFID tags have been reported using
TDR-based technology for data encoding. We can
distinguish between nonprintable and printable TDRbased tags.
An example of a nonprintable TDR-based chipless
RFID tag is the SAW tag, for example, developed by
RFSAW Inc. [15]. SAW tags are excited by a chirped
Gaussian pulse sent by the reader centered around
2.45 GHz [16][20]. A SAW tag is shown in Figure 4.
The interrogation pulse is converted to a SAW using
Spectral
Signature Based
TDR
TDR Based
based
Nonprintable
SAW Tags
Printable
TFTC
Delay-LineBased Tags
Chemical
Amplitude/Phase Backscatter
Modulation Based
Planar Circuits
Left-Hand (LH)
Delay Lines
Nanometric
Materials
Capacitively
Tuned Dipoles
Stub-Loaded
Patch Antenna
Ink-Tattoo
Chipless RFID
Space Filling
Curves
Remote Complex
Impedance
LC Resonant
Carbon
Nanotube Loading
Multiresonator
Based
Multiresonant
Dipoles
Figure 3. Classification of chipless RFID tags. TDR: Time-domain reflectometry; SAW: surface acoustic wave; TFTC:
thin-film-transistor circuit.
December 2010
89
Reflectors
Antenna
Amplitude
Input Signal
011
Reflected Signal
Generated ID: 011
11
11
10
10
01
01
Pulse Position
Modulation Code
Representation
00
110
Reflected Signal
Generated ID: 110
00
Interdigital
Transducer
Time
Antenna
Transmission
Delay Line
Place for
Sensor
Integration
90
December 2010
December 2010
Dipole (Conductor)
Laminate (Dielectric)
First Bit
11th Bit
15
x
Ey
20
25
RCS (dB)
30
35
40
45
50
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
Frequency (GHz)
0.9
Figure 9. Five-bit piano-curve-based tag and tag radarcross-section spectral signature [51].
91
cascaded spiral resonators, which introduce attenuations and phase jumps at particular frequencies of
the spectrum. After passing through the multiresonating circuit, the signal contains the unique spectral
signature of the tag and is transmitted back to the
transmitter using the Tx monopole tag antenna. The
Rx and Tx tag antennas are cross-polarized in order
to minimize interference between the interrogation
signal and the retransmitted encoded signal containing the spectral signature. Figure 11 shows a 35-bit
tag designed on Taconic TLX-0 (er 5 2.45, h 5 0.787
mm, tan d 5 0.0019).
The main differences between the multiresonatorbased tag and those reported in the previous sections
are that the tag encodes data in both amplitude and
phase (Figures 12 and 13), the tag operates in the UWB
region, the tag supports simple spiral shorting data
encoding [58] and the tag responses are not based
on RCS backscattering but on retransmission of the
cross-polarized interrogation signal with the encoded
unique spectral ID. The chipless tag is designed for
printing on the Australian polymer banknote as an
anticounterfeiting security feature.
The Multiresonant dipole-based chipless RFID tag
is based on a similar concept as the multiresonatorbased chipless tag. However, the tags designers seek
to build on the concept of the multiresonator tag by
replacing the stop-band spiral resonators and the second tag antenna with a novel multiresonant dipole
antenna [59]. The multiresonant dipole antenna comprises a set of parallel loop antennas, which resonate at
different frequencies. Each loop antenna corresponds
to a single bit of data. The multiresonant dipole-based
chipless RFID tag is shown in Figure 14. From Figure
14, it is clear that the tag receives the readers wideband
interrogation signal by the Rx UWB monopole antenna
and retransmits only certain frequencies, hence encoding a unique spectral signature in the response signal
sent by the Tx multiresonant dipole antenna.
The multiresonant dipole antenna comprises a
series of folded half-wave dipole antennas. The dipole
arms etched out in the bottom (ground) layer are fed by
a prolongation of the ground
plane with the prolongation
impedance being 50 V. The
half wavelength dipole antennas produce peaks in the
return loss at their resonant
UWB
frequencies. By removing
N th
Monopole
any of the half wavelength
Tx
Resonator
Antenna
dipoles, the corresponding
resonant peak disappears
without influencing the resonances of the other dipoles.
Horizontal Polarization
The main benefit of using the
multiresonant dipole antenna
UWB
Monopole
Rx
Antenna
Vertical Polarization
Multiresonator
First
Resonator
Second
Resonator
Third
Resonator
92
December 2010
Multiresonator
with 35 Spirals
Tag Rx
Antenna
Magnitude of Spectral
Signature (dB)
Tag Tx
Antenna
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
3
5
6
Frequency (GHz)
December 2010
Phase of Spectral
Signature ()
80
60
40
20
0
20
40
60
3
5
6
Frequency (GHz)
Figure 13. 35-bit phase response of the multiresonatorbased chipless RFID tag.
Rx UWB
Monopole
R
Feed
Extension
Tx Multiresonant
Dipole Antenna
Spacing
93
1
1
e j1
2
2
3
3
T e j0
T e j0
Delay Line
Section
3 + 2(1 + 2)+ 60
1 + 20
Carrier Phase
Reflection
Section
2 + 21 + 40
Carrier
Envelope
Free Space
Loss
Zfreespace
S21
Zfreespace
S22
S11
Z0
S12
Inductive/
Reactance
Load
Scattering
Antenna
RFID Reader
Phase Ripple ()
60
40
20
0
20
40
60
6.9
7.1
7.3
7.5
7.7
Frequency (GHz)
7.9
94
December 2010
118 mm
L1 Inset
Width
Element 1
15 mm
SWCNT
L2
Spacing
27 mm
Inset
Length
L3
36 mm
25 mm
(a)
Element 2 Element 3
E-Plane
H-Plane
SWCNT
December 2010
125
75
100
50
75
25
50
25
25
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
Frequency (GHz)
Resistance in NH3
Resistance in Air
Resistance ()
Resistance ()
(b)
50
Resistance in NH3
Resistance in Air
0
Air
NH3 Flow
5
10
15
20
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
Frequency (GHz)
Figure 21. Power reflection coefficient of the carbonnanotube-loaded chipless RFID tag before and after gas
flow [69].
Conclusion
An overview of reported chipless RFID tags in open
literature and on the market has been presented. As
the requirement for cheaper RFID tags for various
95
applications grows, there are a greater number of different chipless RFID tags that can be classified in a
wide range of different types. This article reports the
first classification of chipless RFID tags, which classifies 14 different chipless tags in three main categories.
The main classification of chipless tags is based on
modulation techniques, which are TDR-based, spectral signature-based and amplitude/phase backscatter
modulation-based chipless RFID tags. All three types
of tags can be either printable or nonprintable, which
determines their eligibility for certain applications,
robustness and cost.
Although the majority of chipless tags are still in
prototyping stage it remains to be seen whether they
will make it into the mainstream market. However, the
progress of chipless RFID technology in recent years
enthusiastically suggests that the best of chipless RFID
is yet to come.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the Australian
Research Council under Discovery Grant DP0665523:
Chipless RFID for Bar code Replacement.
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