A re-transmitted chipless tag using CSRR coupled structure
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Abstract
To reduce the cost of the traditional RFID tags, a re-transmitted chipless tag based on high Q CSRR structure working on UWB frequency band is proposed, which is composed of two orthogonal polarization transmitting and receiving microstrip broadband monopole antennas, loaded with multiple CSRR resonators. Data encoding is utilized the hybrid encoding technology by the significantly spectral signature of the high-Q CSRR resonator and the different amplitude on the same frequency point. The coding capacity is achieved 84 bits, which is far greater than other structures chipless tag. Several typical re-transmitted chipless tags based on CSRR structure are designed by HFSS software. The results of simulation and test are well agreeable to verify the feasibility of the proposed tag such tag, and it has low cost, narrow bandwidth and compact structure. It can be applied to low-cost logistics, production line management and other fields.
1 Introduction
Radio frequency identification can make automatic identification and tracking of objects through data wireless capture. Carriers carried by data are called tags and transponders. A radio frequency identification (RFID) reader transmits continuous wave (CW) to a tag. The tag capturing the energy of CW is aroused, and then reflects the data back to the reader (Islam et al. 2015) by a tag antenna. With the rapid development of Internet of Things technology, RFID technology has been deeply applied to people’s daily life. RFID tags have the potential to replace bar codes, but cost of traditional RFID tags with chips are high compared to bar codes, thus limiting the widespread use of RFID technology. To apply RFID tags to items with low price, cost of traditional tag must be reduced, while the cost of traditional tag depends mainly on the cost of chips. To compare the cost of traditional tag with that of bar codes, many scholars have proposed chipless tag (Liu and Yao 2008; Vena et al. 2012), which removes the chip of the traditional tag and embeds encoded data in the passive circuit. On the one hand, it highlights the similar features of low cost of bar codes; on the other hand, it also has the characteristics of automatic tracking of traditional tag and long-range automatic identification. Chipless tags mainly consist of time-domain chipless tags (Vemagiri et al. 2007; Liu and Yao 2008; Preradovic and Karmakar 2010; Chamarti and Varahramyan 2006), frequency-domain chipless tags (Balbin and Karmakar 2009; Costa et al. 2013, 2016), hybrid domain chipless tags (Vena et al. 2013; Ni et al. 2017), and space domain chipless tags (Feng et al. 2015).
The time-domain chipless tag is mainly composed of surface acoustic wave (SAW) or micro strip transmission lines (Liu and Yao 2008; Chamarti and Varahramyan 2006). The reader sends a pulse interrogating signal to the tag, and receives pulse echo of backward scattering. The transmission line on the tag delays the back-scatter signal time. This pulse sequence created can be used for data encoding. For encoding the data in the time domain, the tag antenna receives interrogating signal transmitted by the reader and then forms a pulse-code modulated signal via the SAW medium. But it uses high-cost piezoelectric materials. This kind of tag needs submicron photolithography technology, whose cost has been nearly equal to traditional tag with chips. The non-flat tag can not be completely printed. Because ID generation circuit based on time-domain transmission delay line does not have chip tags, input signal and delay signal are formed a binary coded signal. The tag volume is relatively much larger, but encoding capacity is smaller.
A large number of documents have reported chipless tag based on spectral features (Ei-Awamry et al. 2015; Balbin and Karmakar 2009; Nijas et al. 2012; Costa et al. 2013, 2016). The encoding is achieved by changing spectral structure of resonators. The resonator is a planar printable structure. Data bits corresponded by each resonator are compared to the output spectrum in the specific resonant frequency. By adding or removing different resonators, the notch of resonance frequency spectrum appears on the spectrum or the notch of the resonance frequency spectrum disappears, which forms information coding of the frequency domain. Coding capacity of frequency-based coding technology is large due to the use of planar circuit technology. It can be printed directly and make mass production. But it occupies a wide spectrum, ultra-wide band dedicated RFID reader is necessary.
Chipless tags based on the AM phase domain (Vena et al. 2013) are encoded using a scatter antenna with microstrip branches. The amplitude of the back scatter signal at each resonant frequency is varied by changing stub width. However, the amplitude resolution is chosen as 1, 1.5 and 2 dB, with a difference of only 0.5 dB. It is relatively low, leading to harsh requests for the inspection environment. It proposes a chipless tag in the document (Ni et al. 2017) based on mixed modulation of amplitude and frequency-domain features. By varying the size of the resonator load, the amplitude of spectral features at each resonant frequency is changed. The amplitude modulation and frequency spectrum characteristics are combined for mixed coding. Coding capacity increases greatly. However, the resolution of amplitude is easily affected by the surrounding environment, which easily causes error codes and harsh requirements on the practical use.
In literature (Feng et al. 2015), it proposed a chipless tag based on spatial angle coding. The scatter is designed into a V-shape. The angle between two arms of the V-shape is determined by measuring the field strength of the orthogonal direction. Then the encoding is performed. Although this chipless tag improves the coding capacity, it is limited by field measurement accuracy and environment. It will have a higher bit error rate in practice.
In this paper, we propose a retransmitted chipless tag on frequency domain, which constitutes by complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) and the transmit-and-receive antennas with orthogonal polarization. The main transmission microstrip line is coupling the unit of the CSRR. The orthogonal transmitting and receiving antennas are mainly designed to prevent interference between the interrogation signal and the backscatter signal. The CSRR structure has a resonant structure with high quality factor in the RF microwave frequency band (Falcone et al. 2004), which is applicable to the design of a chipless tag based on frequency domain coding. This chipless tag easily adheres to plastic and paper, has a very compact frequency bandwidth. It significantly improves the band utilization and performance, suitable for large-scale use of low-cost items. In the future it can replace bar codes in the field of supermarkets, production lines and logistics.
2 Working principles of retransmitted RFID chipless tag
Working principle of the retransmission chipless tag based on CSRR
3 Band stop CSRR cell circuit model and characteristics
The structure of complementary split ring resonator was originally proposed by Pendry et al. (1999) . Later, the split ring resonator was used in the design of high Q band stop filters (Mustafa et al. 2010). By adding the number of CSRRs with the same size, the bandwidth and resistance characteristics are improved. Because CSRR resonators have very high Q values, they have a smaller bandwidth than other types of resonators, such as helical and C-type resonators. In this paper, it is applied to chipless tag design based on frequency domain coding to improve the spectrum utilization and increase the coding capacity.
Structure diagram of chipless tag with CSRR resonator
Equivalent circuits of microstrip coupled CSRR resonators
S parameters of single CSRR couple unit
Relationship of CRSS side length and resonant frequency with W1 = 0.5 mm
Resonance point amplitude when the spacing S varies
4 Band-stop CSRR chip tag coding and simulation
The value of the structure parameter
Parameters | W | L | C | d | d1 | h |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
mm | 1.07 | 6 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 2 | 0.508 |
Simulation results of different CRSS combinations of the six-bit
Resonance frequency corresponding to different coding status
Encoding state | ID_111111 (GHz) | ID_010101 (GHz) | ID_101010 (GHz) | ID_110011 (GHz) | ID_111000 (GHz) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
First resonance point | 4.24 | – | 4.26 | 4.24 | 4.25 |
Second resonance point | 4.40 | 4.43 | – | 4.43 | 4.43 |
Third resonance point | 4.58 | – | 4.64 | – | 4.59 |
Fourth resonance point | 4.82 | 4.83 | – | – | – |
Fifth resonance point | 5.04 | – | 5.07 | 5.08 | – |
Sixth resonance point | 5.31 | 5.33 | – | 5.33 | – |
Based on the maximum bandwidth of 60 MHz occupied by each resonator, the protection bandwidth of the two adjacent spectral notch is set to 90 MHz. One spectral feature occupies a bandwidth of 150 MHz. The distance from single CSRR resonator to second harmonic distance is 4.2 GHz, at which 28-bit encoding is possible. As Fig. 6 shows, changing the space of the CSRR and the main microstrip transmission line will lead to change of the notch depth of the resonance point. Their resonant frequencies vary from 4.67 to 4.7 GHz with an occupied frequency band of 30 MHz. The maximum occupied bandwidth is 60 MHz for each resonator. We assume that the frequency remains constant when the coupling distance changes (ie, the notch depth changes). Selective spacing is 0.1, 0.2 and 0.4 mm. When s = 0.4 mm, S21 = − 9.2 dB; S21 = − 13.1 dB for s = 0.2 mm; S21 = − 17.1 dB for s = 0.1 mm. When the space is different, the depth of notch is obviously different with a difference of about 4 dB. Depth of the three notches can be clearly distinguished. There are a total of three different depths of notch. when hybrid coding technology is applied mixed with magnitude modulation and frequency position, CSRR coding capacity becomes 28 × 3 = 84 bits. The coding capacity will increase significantly. It is expected that all encoding states will reach 284 states with a huge coding capacity.
5 Ultra-broadband antenna design
Ultra-wideband antenna photo
3D pattern of UWB antenna
Reflectance coefficient at the UWB antenna input port
VSWR of the UWB
Gain pattern of UWB antenna a 4 GHz, b 8 GHz
6 Measurement results
Photo of CSRR multi-resonator chipless tag
Diagram of test system
Simulated and measured magnitude for CRSS structure tags with a ID 111111, b ID 010101, c ID 110011, d ID 111000
Comparison of different structure chipless tag characteristic
Comparison of different re-transmission chipless tags
Resonator type | Density (bits/cm2) | Notch depth (dB) | Bits by single resonator | Tag antenna gain (dBi) | Read range (cm) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
L-shaped slot DGS (Khaliel et al. 2015) | 1.4 | − 15 to − 22 | 0.5 | 2.3–3 | 30 |
SIR stripe (Girbau et al. 2012) | Not specific | − 10 to − 25 | 1 | 4 | 50 |
Spiral stripe (Preradovic et al. 2009) | 0.61 | − 5 to − 15 | 1 | 2 | Not specific |
Open stub stripe (Haroon et al. 2013) | 0.17 | − 17 to − 32 | 1 | 2 | 40 |
U-shaped (Casula et al. 2014) | 0.07 | − 9 to − 12 | 1 | 3.25 | > 50 |
CSRR (this paper) | 0.63 | − 10 to − 15 | 3 | 1.8–2.5 | 30 |
7 Discussion
Substrate thickness changes
Change in resonant frequency as the length of C
Dielectric material is plastic
Dielectric material is foam
8 Conclusion
A printable chipless tag has been proposed for a CSRR coupled structure operating in the UWB band and high Q. The tag consists of two orthogonally polarized UWB antennas and a 50-Ω main signal microstrip transmission line and multiple cascade CSRR structures for different notch frequencies. Each CSRR forms a notch characteristic in the spectrum of tag re-transmission, corresponding to one data bit. The proposed tag has a high spectral efficiency and 6-bit encoding is achieved in the frequency band from 4.24 to 5.33 GHz, as shown in Table 3. It has a very high encoding capacity compared to other literature. Resonator and UWB antenna is designed by 3D CAD software HFSS. Measured results are well matched with simulation results. The proposed tags are suitable for items with low cost, which can replace cheap bar codes.
Notes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of this project by the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (2015J01657) and the Xiamen Industry-University-Research Collaboration Project (3502Z20163008).
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