A Novel Design for UHF Near-field RFID Reader Antenna Based on Traveling Wave

Ankang Ren, Changying Wu, Ting Wang, Bo Yao

School of Electronic and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi an, Shaanxi 710129, China renankang@163.com

AbstractA novel planar antenna is presented for ultra high frequency (UHF) near-field radio frequency identification (RFID) applications. The antenna is composed of grounded coplanar waveguide, coplanar stripline, a lumped balun, multiple resistances and a finite-size ground plane. The load impedance is equal to the characteristic impedance of the coplanar stripline, so traveling wave can transmit along the coplanar stripline. The proposed structure can make large currents along the coplanar stripline so that a strong and uniform magnetic field distribution is excited in the region around the antenna. The antenna geometry, design concept, simulated and measured results are carefully discussed throughout the paper. Measurements show that the antenna operating with a commercial reader demonstrates good performance of tag identification with inductive coupling for near-field RFID applications. Keywordsnear-field; radio frequency identification (RFID); ultra high frequency (UHF); antenna

Ordinary reader antennas for far-zone reading may not perform well in near-zone applications. Particularly for tags closely stacked or lined up together, the performance of the tags will be reduced significantly due to strong mutual coupling among them [7]. Currently, UHF near-field RFID technology receives a lot of attention due to the promising opportunities of item-level RFID applications in pharmaceutical and retailing industry, which spurs the investigation of the antennas for UHF near-field applications [8, 9]. II. NEAR-FIELD RFID ANTENNA Near field antenna concept is well established technical area with existing standards, measurement techniques, and companies which specialize in design and testing [10]. Similar to the LF/HF near-field RFID systems, a UHF near-field RFID reader antenna and tags can couple each other either magnetically (inductively) or electrically (capacitively). Inductively coupling RFID systems are preferred in most applications since the majority of reactive energy is stored in the magnetic field. These systems are only affected by objects with high magnetic permeability, and therefore they are able to operate in close proximity to metals and liquids. In contrast, capacitively coupling RFID systems are hardly used in practical applications because the energy stored in the electric field is severely affected by objects with high dielectric permittivity [11, 12].

I. INTRODUCTION Radio frequency identification (RFID), which was developed around World War II, is a technology that provides wireless identification and tracking capability and is more robust than that of a bar code. Although the first paper on modulated backscatter (basic principle of passive RFID) was published in 1948 [1], it took considerable amount of time before the technology advanced to current level [2]. Now RFID finds many applications in various areas such as electronic toll collection, asset identification, retail item management, access control, animal tracking, and vehicle security [3, 4]. In an ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID system, the reader emits signals through reader antennas. When an RFID tag comprising an antenna and an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is located in the reading zone of the reader antenna, the tag is activated and interrogated for its content information by the reader. The querying signal from the reader must have enough power to activate the tag ASIC to perform data processing, and transmit back a modulated string over a required reading distance [5, 6].

Fig. 1. Inductively coupling mechanism in near-field RFID systems.

This research was supported by the Science and Technology Projects of Shaanxi Province, China [grant No. 2010K06-16].

Fig. 1 shows the inductively coupling mechanism of a typical near-field RFID system [9]. To successfully design a near-field UHF RFID system, it is important to investigate the antenna coupling between reader and tag. However, to our knowledge, only a few attempts have so far been made at computing coupling of near-field RFID systems [12, 13]. According to [6], the coupling coefficient between the antennas can be expressed as:

C f 2 N tag S tag B 2 a

(1)

where f is the frequency, N tag is the number of turns in tag antenna coil, S tag is the cross-section area of the coil, B is magnetic field density at the tag location created by the reader antenna, and a is the antenna misalignment loss. III. ANTENNA DESIGN To satisfy the near-zone reading requirements, a proper reader antenna design is very important for the RFID system [10]. This paper introduces a novel planar near-field reader antenna that can achieve a strong and uniformly distributed H Z field. Fig. 2 exhibits the configuration of the designed near-field planar antenna. The antenna is composed of grounded coplanar waveguide, coplanar stripline and multiple segmented line, and is fabricated on a 1.6 mm FR4 substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.4 and a loss tangent of 0.02 which is suspended above the finite-size ground plane at a height of h (20 mm). The distance between coplanar stripline is D = 20 mm, the dimensions of the designed antenna are shown in Fig. 2(a), (b).
R R

(c) Fig. 2. Configuration of the designed antenna (a) Top view, (b) Side view, (c) Photograph.

The impedance matching between the coplanar stripline and the grounded coplanar waveguide can be achieved using an impedance matching circuit which can be realized using lumped balun, the other end of the coplanar wave-guide is connected to an RF input. The load resistance at the end of the coplanar stripline is equal to the characteristic impedance of the coplanar stripline, The surface currents flow in two opposite directions. Thus this planar antenna is designed to excite strong magnetic fields parallel to the reader antenna. Traveling wave can transmit on it, so we can change the length of the antenna to meet the different requirements. Air substrate is used in this configuration to achieve broader bandwidth and lower cost. IV. RESULTS The antenna designs and their dimensions presented in previous were optimized using Ansoft HFSS based on finite element method (FEM). To ensure correct resonance frequency and to study the return loss (S11) and bandwidth characteristics of the antenna designs, measurements with a network analyzer was carried out. Fig. 3 compares the measured and simulated impedance matching of the designed antenna, good agreement was observed. Broadband impedance matching was achieved. The 15 dB return loss bandwidth is 200 MHz (8001000 MHz) which covers the entire UHF RFID band of 840960 MHz. The simulated gain patterns of the antenna designs are shown in Fig. 4(a), (b). The designed antenna had typical maximum gain of -10 dB in x-z plane and -10.1 dB in y-z plane, respectively. In order to analyze the performance in the near zone, the magnetic field distributions is simulated in horizontal plane. Fig. 5(a), (b) and (c) show the simulated magnetic field distribution in the horizontal plane at height of 3cm, 4cm, 5cm, respectively. The uniform field distribution is achieved over the region which is enclosed by the antenna, no nulling area is observed, which is desired for near-field RFID applications.

(a)

(b)

10 15

Simulated Measured

20 25 30 35 40 800

850

900

950

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To examine the antenna performance, the experiments on tag reading have been performed. The measurement setup is shown in Fig. 6. A commercial RFID reader from Impinj with a maximum output power of 1 Watt was used to identify single loop tag with inductive coupling in the frequency range 922-928 MHz. The reading area of the designed antenna is shown in Fig. 7. The measurements exhibit that the near-field reader antenna has a maximum readable range of 7 cm for the loop tag with a diameter of only 9 mm located at the center. At the edge of the antenna, a readable range of 3 cm can still be achieved. Good agreement between the simulated magnetic field distribution and reading area has been observed.

Return Loss (dB)

Frequency (MHz)

Fig. 3. Simulated and measured return loss of the designed antenna.

x-z plane

0 dB -10 -14 30

330

300

-18 -22

60

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240

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y-z plane

dB

330

-10 -12 -14

30

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(b) Fig. 4. Gain of the designed antenna at 900 MHz in (a) x-z plane, (b) y-z plane.

Fig. 5 Simulated magnetic field distribution in the horizontal plane, the height at (a) 3cm, (b) 4cm, (c) 5cm.

V. CONCLUSION In this paper we presented a novel planar RFID reader antenna for near-zone UHF communication. The antenna configuration, design methodology, and simulated and measured results have been well discussed. This antenna is capable of producing a strong magnetic field with a fairly uniform field distribution, so that the tags used in the near-field are able to be detected well through the inductive coupling. Good performances in simulations and measurements have been obtained. Our results confirm that the proposed antenna is suitable as a near-field UHF antenna which meet the special requirements. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Fig. 6. Experimental setup for testing designed antenna in reading loop tag

The authors would like to thank Amna for her continuing help throughout this work. REFERENCES
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(a)

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(c) Fig. 7. Reading area of the antenna (black section), the reading range at: (a) 3cm, (b) 4cm, (c) 5cm.