Design of UHF RFID systems using computational electromagnetics

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are gaining popularity in recent years due to their application to retail supply chain management. In practice, very often the electromagnetic (EM) performance of the reader/tag systems could be significantly degraded due to the complex physical environments. With the aid of computational electromagnetic (CEM) tools, such situations can be analyzed and optimized to improve the performance of RFID systems. This paper presents options for the EM characterization of such systems with the aid of full wave or hybrid numerical methods. Analysis of RFID tags, readers, tag placement, tag/reader coupling, and tag/reader systems in complex environments will be addressed.