Wearable UHF RFID Tag Antenna Design Using Flexible Electro-Thread and

Textile

Yeonho Kim*, Kyounghwan Lee, Yongju Kim, You Chung Chung

Information and Communication Engineering Dept, Daegu University

Kyungsan, Kyungbuk 712-714 Korea,
youchung@daegu.ac.kr

1. INTRODUCTION
An RFID tag is usually attached to the price tag or label of an expansive cloth,
liquor bottle and other products. To distinguish the genuine product from
counterfeit or imitation products, the RFID tag is recently used in many
applications. The RFID tag can be attached to the products directly, paper tag
with barcode, price tag or to the label. Especially for a cloth, the label with RFID
tag can be separated from the cloth easily. It is hard to keep the tag with the cloth.
Therefore, in this paper, the embedded UHF RFID tag on the textile label or
thread of the textile of the cloth is studied. The tag antenna is designed with
flexible thread or textile.

Wearable antennas have been applied many wireless applications. Fabric and
textile have been used for wearable antennas [1-12]. The wearable antennas have
been designed for WLAN, GPS, military and police related applications [1-4].
The effect of the body near the conductive textile material as an antenna has been
researched [2-3]. The flexible and attachable antenna on a human body is also
studied [4]. The dual-band textile antenna has been designed in the reference [5].
The fabric construction of the electro-textiles and their effect on the efficiency of
the e-textile patch antennas are discussed in [6]. The ultra-wideband wearable
antenna has been designed in [7-8]. The reference [9] shows the effect of the
wearable antenna location on the body. The embedded UHF RFID tag using
electro-textile or thread can be applied to wearable and flexible tag antenna
attached to any flexible surface or wire.

The RFID system has the computer, reader, reader antenna and tag. The tag can
be a passive or active tag. A passive tag consists of an antenna and an RFID IC
chip connected at the feeding point of the tag antenna. A passive tag receives the
required power from the carrier signal from the reader by backscattering method
[10]. Frequency band of UHF RFID is from 860~960MHz. RFID Various RFID
tag antennas have been shown in the references [11-14].

2. UHF RFID TAG ANTENNA DESIGN USING FLEXIBLE FABRIC AND TEXTILE
The electro-fabric has a characteristic resistance value. In Figure 1, two different
types of electro-threads are measured. The model numbers of threads are MFT
12100tg and NTD-100A Ag-Line, as shown in Figure 1. According to the
resistance measurements of the electro-thread, since the resistance value per unit
length of MFT 12100tg is more stable than that of NTD-100A Ag-Line, the
resistance value of the first thread is only measured. The diameter is of the first
electro-thread is 12 micro-meter.

1-4244-0878-4/07/$20.00 ©2007 IEEE 5487

 (a) MFT 12100tg (b) NTD-100A Ag-Line (c) Fabric made with MFT
12100tg
Fig. 1 Electro-Fabric and textile

(a) MFT 12100tg (b) NTD-100A Ag-Line (c) Fabric made with MFT 12100tg

Fig. 2 Resistance value per unit length of MFT 12100tg

The fabric made with the MFT 12100tg electro-thread is shown in Figure 1. It can
be used as antenna material in the future. The resistance measurement results of
the first electro-thread are shown in Figure 2. The single, double and triple twisted
are shown in Figure 2. When the number of twist thread is increased, the
resistivity is reduced according to the Figure 2. The resistance per unit length of
the electro-thread is almost linear to the length. It is good to use as a flexible
antenna. The simple dipole UHF RFID tag has been designed in this paper.

3. FABRICATION AND MEASUREMENTS

The conductivity of MFT 12100tg is 2.45S/m and it is used as a characteristic
value of the antenna material. T-matching impedance matching method is used
between the tag antenna and RFID chip, as shown in Figure 3. In Figure 3, the
parameters of antenna are shown, length and width of the antenna, and size of T-
matching parameters. In Figure 3, the red circle is the location of the RFID chip.
Table 1 shows design values of antenna parameter. In the return loss, the
bandwidth at -3dB, is about 87MHz (865 MHz~952MHz), and the bandwidth at -
10dB, is about 27MHz, shown as Fig. 4. In the radiation pattern shown in Figure
5, the main lobe gain is about 1.7dB.

The reading range of the flexible fabric tag antenna is measured. Figure 5 shows
the one of the fabricated tag antenna. In the open space, the reading range is
measured with ALR9800 reader and ALR-9610-AL reader antenna manufactured
by Alien Co. The size of antenna is about 120*9mm. Figure 6 shows the reading
range measurement of the flexible electro-thread tag antenna. The reading range
(main lobe) is about 2.4m, which is longer than that of the same size of
conventional UHF RFID tag (reading range is about 1~2m). The real part of chip

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impedance value is about 6~7 ohm, so the resistive antenna material can be
matched better than the conventional copper antenna material.

4. CONCLUSION
The flexible electro-thread UHF RFID tag antenna has been designed using T-
matching method. The antenna size is compact than conventional dipole antenna
and reading range is about 2.4m, better than conventional UHF RFID tags made
with copper. The Future works are the optimizing size to have better reading
range, and finding applications of fabric and electro-thread tag antennas.

REFERENCES
[1] P. Salonen, H. Hurme, K. Finkenzeller, “A novel fabric WLAN antenna for wearable
applications”, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 2 , pp. 22 –
27, June 2003.
[2] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, H. Hurme, M. Kivikoski, ” Effect of conductive
material on wearable antenna performance: a case study of WLAN antennas,” IEEE
Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 2 , pp. 455 – 458, 2004.
[3] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, M. Schaffrath, M. Kivikoski, “Effect of textile
materials on wearable antenna performance: a case study of GPS antennas,” IEEE
Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 2 , pp. 459– 462, 2004.
[4] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, M. Kivikoski, ” Wearable antennas in the vicinity of
human body,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 2 , pp. 467–
470, 2004.
[5] P. Salonen, Jaehoon Kim, Y. Rahmat-Samii, “Dual-band E-shaped patch wearable
textile antenna,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 1 , pp.
466– 469, 2004.
[6] Ouyang Yuehui, E. Karayianni, W.J. Chappell, “Effect of fabric patterns on
electrotextile patch antennas,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium,
vol. 2 , pp. 246– 249, 2005.
[7] Taeyoung Yang, W.A. Davis, W.L. Stutzman, “Wearable ultra-wideband half-disk
antennas,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Symposium, vol. 3 , pp. 500-503,
2005.
[8] Ouyang Yuehui, W.J. Chappell, W.L. Stutzman, “Novel small-size directional
antenna for UWB WBAN/WPAN applications,” IEEE Trans. on Antennas and
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[9] Ouyang Yuehui, W.J. Chappell, W.L. Stutzman, “Diversity characterization of body-
worn textile antenna system at 2.4 GHz,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society
Symposium, 2004., vol. 3 , pp. 2117-2120, 2006.
[10] K. Finkenzeller, “RFID Handbook,” 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, England,
2003.
[11] Goojo Kim , You Chung Chung, “Optimization of UHF RFID Tag Antennas
Using a Genetic Algorithm,” IEEE AP-S and USNC/URSI National Radio Science
Digest, Albuquerque, NM., July, 2007
[12] Yeonho Kim, Park Yongkwon, Kyunghwan Lee, Goojo Kim, You Chung Chung,
“Characteristics of Loop Antenna Structure of RFID Tag Antenna,” 2005
International Conference on Computer, Communication Systems, pp. 353-356, Nov.
2005.
[13] Sangon Lee, You Chung Chung, Shinhwan Kim, Changsik Lee, “RFID Tag
Antenna for Metallic Objects.” 2005 International Conference on Computer
Communication Systems, pp. 267-270, Nov. 2005.
[14] Goojo Kim, You Chung Chung, Shinhwan Kim, “Various Polarizations of RFID
Antenna,” Korea Electromagnetic and Microwave Engineering Society, digest, vol.
28. no.2, pp. 279-282, Sep. 2005

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 Table 1. Parameter values of
tag antenna

Parameters Value(mm)

ant_l 60

ant_w 2

tmatch1_w 2

tmatch1_h 5

tmatch2_w 10

Fig. 3 Structure of Tag antenna tmatch2_h 2

Fig. 4 Return loss of Tag antenna Fig. 5 Beam pattern of Tag

antenna

Fig. 6 Fabricated tag antenna

Fig. 6 Reading range of tag antenna

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