A Broadband UHF Tag Antenna For Near-Field and Far-Field RFID Communications

Abstract

The paper deals with the design of passive broadband tag antenna for Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) band. The antenna is intended for both near and far fields Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications. The meander dipole tag antenna geometry modification is designed for frequency bandwidth increasing. The measured bandwidth of the proposed broadband Tag antenna is more than 140 MHz (820–960 MHz), which can cover the entire UHF RFID band. A comparison between chip impedance of datasheet and the measured chip impedance has been used in our simulations. The proposed progressive meandered antenna structure, with an overall size of 77 mm × 14 mm × 0.787 mm, produces strong and uniform magnetic field distribution in the near-field zone. The antenna impedance is matched to common UHF chips in market simply by tuning its capacitive and inductive values since a perfect matching is required in the antenna design in order to enhance the near and the far field communications. Measurements confirm that the designed antenna exhibits good performance of Tag identification for both near-field and far-field UHF RFID applications.