The art of UHF RFID antenna design: impedance-matching and size-reduction techniques

TLDR

RFID technology, based on a reader/tag paradigm, is rapidly permeating everyday life, and electromagnetic research focuses on designing high‑efficiency, small‑size tag antennas with complex impedance matching. The paper surveys methodologies for designing UHF passive tag antennas. The authors compile fragmented literature into a unified framework, illustrate basic concepts of common design layouts, and demonstrate techniques with many noncommercial examples.

Abstract

Radio-frequency identification technology, based on the reader/tag paradigm, is quickly permeating several aspects of everyday life. The electromagnetic research mainly concerns the design of tag antennas having high efficiency and small size, and suited to complex impedance matching to the embedded electronics. Starting from the available but fragmented open literature, this paper presents a homogeneous survey of relevant methodologies for the design of UHF passive tag antennas. Particular care is taken to illustrate, within a common framework, the basic concepts of the most-used design layouts. The design techniques are illustrated by means of many noncommercial examples.