Three-Dimensional Chipless RFID Tags: Fabrication through Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

A new class of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags, namely the three-dimensional (3D)-printed chipless RFID one, is proposed, and their performance is assessed. These tags can be realized by low-cost materials, inexpensive manufacturing processes and can be mounted on metallic surfaces. The tag consists of a solid dielectric cylinder, which externally appears as homogeneous. However, the information is hidden in the inner structure of the object, where voids are created to encrypt information in the object. The proposed chipless tag represents a promising solution for anti-counterfeiting or security applications, since it avoids an unwanted eavesdropping during the reading process or information retrieval from a visual inspection that may affect other chipless systems. The adopted data-encoding algorithm does not rely on On–Off or amplitude schemes that are commonly adopted in the chipless RFID implementations but it is based on the maximization of available states or the maximization of non-overlapping regions of uncertainty. The performance of such class of chipless RFID tags are finally assessed by measurements on real prototypes.

How Can We Provide Additively Manufactured Parts with a Fingerprint? A Review of Tagging Strategies in Additive Manufacturing

“…A bibliographic search conducted in Scopus on 24 October 2021, entering “additive manufacturing” AND “anti-counterfeiting” as keywords in “article title, abstract, keywords” returned only 17 results. Whereas the majority of these papers described polymer-based parts, the list narrowed down to six results upon adding “metal” as an additional keyword, with the search results including the experimental contributions by Eisenbarth et al [ 12 ], Flank et al [ 14 ], Terranova et al [ 17 ], and Wei et al [ 10 ], the review paper on 3D printable inks based on coordination compounds by Maldonado and Amo-Ochoa [ 18 ], and the introduction to the “6th International Conference on Precision Machinery and Manufacturing Technology” [ 19 ]. It is worth noting that none of the identified papers dealt with ceramic-based AM.…”

“…Naturally, this was a very rough attempt to grab a general picture of the state of the art, and relevant papers may have remained out of sight because of indexing with different keywords. Furthermore, as exemplified in Table 1 [ 4 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 16 , 17 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ], the wide range of different terms used as keywords in published papers makes it difficult to conduct an exhaustive bibliographic search.…”

“…Whereas conventional identification devices consist of an antenna connected to an integrated circuit, chip-less RFID tags do not rely on an integrated circuit to encode the information. Recently, Terranova et al [ 17 ] produced a chip-less RFID tag for AM parts by 3D printing it with the fused filament fabrication (FFF) (aka fused deposition modelling, FDM) technique. This approach offers numerous advantages, because the new tag leverages a three-dimensional geometry to increase its coding capacity compared to conventional bi-dimensional systems.…”

A Smart Sensing System of Water Quality and Intake Monitoring for Livestock and Wild Animals

“…Recently, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies [33] have gained popularity in the application of the internet of things [34,35] and especially in sensors and sensing systems [36,37], such as 3D chipless RFID tags [38], fully-textile chipless tags [39], and frequency-signature based wearable tags [40]. The wireless sensor network has also been playing an important role in industrial and agricultural applications [41].…”

Frequency-Spectra-Based High Coding Capacity Chipless RFID Using an UWB-IR Approach

“…It is also worth noting that the authors have suggested textile wearable application technology devices in the literature [ 42 , 43 ], which can be used as chipless RFID sensor tags in identification and tracking applications. There is also the three-dimensional chipless RFID tag suggested in [ 44 ]. Since the commercialization of chipless RFID requires a communication specification, it is important to consider the appropriate bandwidth for a frequency spectrum system.…”