Design Approach for Robust UHF RFID Tag Antennas Mounted on a Plurality of Dielectric Surfaces [Antenna Designer´s Notebook]

A design approach is presented for passive UHF RFID tag antennas to function efficiently when mounted on a wide variety of dielectric materials of arbitrary thickness. It is well understood that the presence of materials can detune an antenna by shifting its operational band. It is therefore important to design tags that can accommodate such a shift in frequency due to material effects. In this paper, we propose a way to modify existing classical tag designs to enable them to operate over a wide range of materials (3 <; ε_r <; 13 ) and arbitrary thickness. Experimental results showed that when compared to commercially available tags, the modified tags achieved better performance when mounted on a wide range of materials.