Simultaneous UHF energy harvesting and UWB-RFID communication

This paper describes the design of a compact antenna system to enable communication and RF energy harvesting at the same time. The system may be adopted for next generation passive RFID tags: it combines, in a low-profile architecture on a paper substrate, a single-port antenna with its multi-frequency feeding network, to operate in the European UWB and UHF bands, for communication/localization and energy harvesting purposes, respectively. The design and performance of the whole system are discussed and the interference between the two operations is minimized. This is demonstrated by some representative results for both communication and energy harvesting activities.