UHF RFID Temperature Sensor Tag Integrated into a Textile Yarn

Environmental Burden Case Study of RFID Technology in Logistics Centre

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has established itself as an effective tool for identifying various objects in all human and business areas. There are many studies describing the use of this technology. However, scientific articles only marginally address the issue of recycling or reusing radio frequency identifiers. Radio frequency identifiers are defined as electronic waste by European Union legislation. This article deals with the environmental burden resulting from the use of radio frequency identifiers in a selected logistics centre and courier company in the Slovak and Czech Republic territories. The research and its relevance have become topical in the context of pandemics and with the increasing demand for products and courier services. In order to access the level of the above-mentioned environmental burden in a relevant way, an analysis of the circulation of transport units (pallets) and radio frequency identifiers in the selected logistics centre was carried out. The research results showed that the selected logistics centre generated annually 5.7 t of the e-waste from radio frequency identifiers placed on received pallets. The amount of 139 kg of metal was present in the e-waste quantity. The partial results of the research were applied to the e-commerce area. This article's conclusion is dedicated to the characterization of possibilities of reducing the environmental burden from the use of radio frequency identifiers in logistics.

The Influence of Textile Substrates on the Performance of Textronic RFID Transponders

Recent advances in the development of innovative textronic products are often related to the implementation of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. Such devices contain components of wireless telecommunications systems, in which radiofrequency circuits should be designed taking into account not only the frequency band or destined application, but also the dielectric properties of the materials. As is known from the theory of RFID systems, the dielectric permittivity and loss angle of the substrates significantly affect the performance of RFID transponders. Therefore, the knowledge on the variability of these parameters is highly important in the context of developing new solutions in textronic devices with the RFID interface. According to the plan of studies, at the beginning, the comprehensive characterization and determination of the dielectric parameters of various types of textile substrates were carried out. On this basis, the influence of fabrics on the performance of textronic RFID (RFIDtex) tags was characterized with numerical calculations. As the RFIDtex transponders proposed by the authors in the patent PL231291 have an outstanding design in which the antenna and the chip are located on physically separated substrates and are galvanically isolated, the special means had to be implemented when creating a numerical model. On the other hand, the great advantage of the developed construction was confirmed. Since the impedance at the chip's terminals is primarily determined by the coupling system, the selected fabrics have relatively low impact on the efficiency of the RFIDtex transponder. Such an effect is impossible to achieve with classical designs of passive or semi-passive transponders. The correctness of the simulations was verified on the exemplary demonstrators, in threshold and rotation measurements performed at the laboratory stand.

From Identification to Sensing: RFID Is One of the Key Technologies in the IoT Field

RFID (radio frequency identification) technology appeared nearly 70 years ago. Deployed more widely only from the early 2000s, it is now booming and its development is still accelerating. As its name indicates, its original function was the identification (of objects, animals, people) and its applications were then essentially aimed at traceability, access control and logistics. If this type of use is still relevant today with more and more new application contexts and more and more efficient RFID tags, RFID has also evolved by integrating new capabilities. These new tags, known as augmented tags, include an information capture function. With the explosion of connected objects and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), this old technology that is RFID still has a promising future and will probably be more and more present in our private and professional environments in all fields: logistics, industry, agriculture, building, health and even space.

Near Field Sensing Applications with Tunable Beam Millimeter Wave Antenna Sensors in an All-in-One Chip Design

In this paper, a single-band beam control antenna is designed with a parallel coupler to realize a microstrip patch antenna passive wireless sensor in the form of a chip. It has a phase shift characteristic of the antenna radiation direction in the positive and negative directions. The antenna includes an orthogonal direction coupler design with a 90° parallel coupler in phase using a special structure that allows the whole chip area to be miniaturized while allowing the main beam angle to have a directivity function. The coupler is designed for the 28 GHz millimeter wave band. After feeding the patch antenna at the output port of the coupler and simultaneously feeding the excitation at the input port, the beam phase changes to +45° and +135° with a phase difference of 90°. The designed antenna size is 1160 μm × 790 m, and the overall IC size is 1.2 mm × 1.2 mm. The power density simulation shows that the maximum power density is only 0.00797 W/kg for a 1 human sampling area, which means that the antenna sensor is suitable for use on human surfaces.