Design, development, and performance evaluation of a compact and long‐range passive UHF RFID tag

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be classified in terms of reading range.Short-range tags communicate with the reader up to a few centimetres. Medium-range tags reach almost 5 meters. Long-range tags work properly up to almost 12 meters. Nevertheless, the longer is the working distance, the larger is the tag size. In this work, a new passive UHF RFID tag has been designed, realized, and tested. Based on the joint use of various design and miniaturization techniques, our device is as compact as a medium-range tag. The tag prototype has been extensively tested and compared with both a commercial medium-range tag with similar size and a well-performing long range tag. For all such tags, measurements of received signal strength indication, working range, tag sensitivity, and differential radar cross section have been carried out and compared. Results are impressive. Despite the compactness of the proposed tag, its performance is appreciably better than the medium-range tag and even comparable with the tested long range one. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:1335–1339, 2012