Factors Affecting the Synthesis of Autonomous Sensors with RFID Interface

Abstract

A general view on the problem of designing atypical battery-free, autonomous semi-passive RFID transponders-sensors (autonomous sensors with RFID interfaces) is presented in this review. Although RFID devices can be created in any of the electronic technologies, the design stage must be repeated each time when the manufacturing processes are changed, and their specific conditions have to be taken into consideration when modeling new solutions. Aspects related to the factors affecting the synthesis of semi-passive RFID transponder components on the basis of which the idea of the autonomous RFID sensor was developed are reflected in the paper. Besides their general characteristics, the operation conditions of modern RFID systems and achievements in autonomous RFID sensor technology are revealed in subsequent sections—they include such issues as technological aspects of the synthesis process, designing antennas for RFID transponders, determining RFID chip and antenna parameters, creating the interrogation zone IZ, etc. It should be pointed that the universal construction of an autonomous RFID sensor, which could be use in any application of the automatic object identification system, cannot be developed according to the current state of the art. Moreover, a trial and error method is the most commonly used in the today’s process of designing new solutions, and the basic parameters are estimated on the basis of the tests and the research team experience. Therefore, it is necessary to look for new inventions and methods in order to improve implementations of RFID systems.

Wireless Power Transfer Techniques for Implantable Medical Devices: A Review

“…It is worth mentioning that radio frequency identification (RFID) demonstrated significant potential for low and high frequency WPT and energy harvesting applications. However, its implementation using different WPT techniques can be a major challenge for MIDs [220,221].…”

Designing Antennas for RFID Sensors in Monitoring Parameters of Photovoltaic Panels

“…On the other hand, the modern RFID technology provides the ability to modify data in the transponders' internal memory in accordance with consumer requirements. Intelligent implementations can even learn about the environment by gathering data with a variety of sensors embedded in the structure of the sempassive RFID transponders [27,28]. This feature, which is still not used in automated identification systems, has been implemented in the presented application of PV panel supervising.…”

“…Of course, such an entire circuit can be integrated into a one semiconductor chip with the option of connecting external transducers of physical quantities, but this requires significant financial resources. All the above-mentioned aspects of designing RFID sensors that are possible to be adopted in the monitoring of PV panels are discussed in detail in [27].…”

“…Apart from the issue of developing electronic circuits of RFID sensors, which is revealed in [27], the most difficult problem consists in designing an antenna that can cooperate with the semipassive chip with the extended internal structure of additional functionalities and could be attached to the PV panel without losing its effectiveness. The enlargement of the interrogation zone is limited mainly by the energy conditions that have to be satisfied in the UHF RFID system [1] and particularly by the possibility of passing energy to the transponder in the presence of photovoltaic cell components that disturb the electromagnetic field.…”

Textronic UHF RFID Transponder

“…Unlike the typical transponders in which the chip is permanently attached (trough soldering, gluing, etc.) to the pads of antenna circuit [19], it was necessary to pay special attention to the innovative and unusual way of assembling both components in the proposed RFIDtex devices.…”