Impact of dielectric substrates on chipless RFID tag performance

Abstract

A five-slot hexagonal shape chipless RFID tag is designed, simulated, and manufactured on FR4 substrate. The designed tag's copper geometry was replicated on a wide range of dielectric substrate to quantify the impact on resonance quality factor (RQF) and resonating frequencies. The tag's performance was assessed in three configurations. First, a hexagonal shape tag's radar cross section (RCS) was studied over different dielectric substrates. The various dielectric substrate effects were investigated over the maximum read range, resonant frequencies and RQF. In the second evaluation, the physical geometry of the tag was adjusted to achieve the spectral signatures in 2–7 GHz frequency band with high RQF. In step three, the optimized tag geometry was manufactured on FR4, Roger Duroid 5880, and polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) substrates. Denford milling machine for PCB engraving and inkjet printing for silver nanoparticles deposition were used for tags manufacturing. During tag manufacturing, copper and silver were used as conducting materials for RCS backscattering. The tag RCS response was measured by vector network analyzer with bi-static antenna setup. The analysis of different dielectric substrate provides a pathway of designing a novel substrate by using various nanomaterials.

Use of Chipless RFID as a Passive, Printable Sensor Technology for Aerospace Strain and Temperature Monitoring

“…This approach is highly suited for sensors which encode information in the null frequency of the scattering response. However, many sensors and tags within the literature appear to demonstrate that their resonant response changes shape significantly with a changing stimulus or dielectric constant variation [6,[55][56][57][58]. One limitation of this approach is that the resolution of the extracted feature is directly related to the resolution of the frequency response dataset.…”