A low cost miniature UHF RFID tag antenna using paper substrate

Abstract

This paper presents a new design of a low cost passive UHF RFID tag antenna using paper substrate. The design is based on a short dipole loaded at both ends with a pair of triangles and four arms in order to reduce the size of the design. By choosing a proper dimension of the short dipole and the T-matching network, a good and broadband impedance matching can be achieved. The simulation results carried out by ADS from Agilent technologies and CST Microwave Studio electromagnetic solvers, demonstrate that we have good performances in term of return loss, gain, radiation pattern and read range for the desired frequency bands. This antenna has a total area of 80×34 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and mounted on a paper substrate. With a constant dielectric permittivity, equal to 3.3, a thickness of 0.5 mm and a loss tangent of 0.04. The simulated bandwidth at the UHF RFID band is about 56 MHz, which covers the North and South American UHF RFID band (894–950 MHz). The gain obtained into simulation of this antenna is 1.88 dB at 915 MHz and the simulated read range is 5.78 m.