Millimeter-wave Chipless RFID Tag for Authentication Applications

In this paper, a millimeter-wave chipless RFID tag for authentication applications is presented. The concept is based on the idea that it is extremely difficult to identically reproduce materials that inherently have a random aspect, due to manufacture process variations. This paper introduces the paradigm of the millimeter-wave authentication based on labels without any chip, including an identifier capable to communicating with waves in the millimeter-wave range. For this purpose, millimeter-wave chipless tags without a ground plane are designed using the RF Encoding Particle (REP) technique. This approach establishes a relation between the geometrical parameters of the isolated scatter and its electromagnetic signature. To increase the RCS of the tag an elementary particle multiplication strategy is envisaged. The evaluated probability of error around 17% is reached with a fabricated tag set from the same manufacturer at the same time. This probability is two times lower than the one obtained with a similar approach implemented in the X-band.