Antenna Design and Measurements for Conductive Thermal Transfer Printing Based RFID Production

In this article we present a new RFID antenna design based on conductive thermal transfer printing. We first describe the key antenna design parameters, including antenna shape, dimensions, and number of lobes, among others. The desirable range of these parameters have been determined empirically through an extensive experimentation campaign for impedance matching. Then, we print the antenna using conductive Aluminum ribbon on PET coated paper. We evaluate the performance of the new antenna by comparing it with 13 existing benchmark antennas using a commercial RFID reader at 915 MHz. It is found that the new antenna design can achieve better range-angle trade-off than the benchmarks.