A study of cost-effective conductive ink for inkjet-printed RFID application

In this paper, the cost performance of the commercially available inkjet printing conductive inks is evaluated for the UHF RFID tag application. For the same printing technique, the cost mainly depends on 2 factors; the cost of the conductive ink and the printed ink volume. The simulation results indicated that lower ink volume is required for the greater conductivity conductive ink in order to achieve the same level of the antenna efficiency. However, the cost is not consistently reduced together with the volume. The smart selection of the conductive ink with the proper cost and electrical conductivity can save more than 90% for the inkjet-printed UHF RFID tag antenna fabrication.