Aperture Coupled Dielectric Resonator Antenna for Miniaturized Metal-mountable UHF RFID tag

UHF RFID tags for industrial applications requires tags to be metal-mountable, small and having long operational/reading range. Most tag design approaches have to compromise between size and operational range or bandwidth. In this paper, an aperture coupled cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna(DRA) for miniaturized metal-mountable UHF RFID tag has been presented. A wideband, long range miniaturized metal-mountable UHF RFID tag is realized by firstly utilizing the small form factor of a HE
11δ
mode dielectric resonator. And sencondly, by taking advantage of the symmetricity of the balanced port in a RFID chip, a novel compact feeding structure was proposed to further reduce the size. Antenna characteristics and its feeding structure have been studied by fullwave simulation, and prototypes have been fabricated and tested. The proposed antenna design resulted in a UHF RFID tag with overall size of only Φ27.4mm*14mm. Its reading range is from 4m to 12m depending on the size of metal surface on which the tag has been mounted. And the measured reading range bandwidth of the prototype is 40MHz. Although it is small in size, it presented a wide bandwidth to cover both Chinese and North American bands.