Designing an Efficient Ultra Small Form Factor On-Chip Antenna for UHF RFID Application

Abstract

The efficient design of electrically small antennas (ESA) has recently evolved to an outstandingly active area of research. This paper aims to present an improved performance electrically small on-chip antenna design, for the 920 MHz UHF-RFID frequency. Performance improvement is based on creating a slow-wave structure with three-dimensional spiral meandering and dielectric loading of the complete antenna structure. A single layer spiral on-chip antenna simulation is presented first, based on a commercially available product, then an improved single layer spiral antenna and finally an alternative 3D multi-layer spiral on-chip antenna is investigated. The proposed alternative on-chip antenna structure fills a 2.5 x 2.5 x 1.3 mm3 volume and has significantly improved radiation performance compared to the single layer solution.