On the Cooperative Exploitation of Antenna Sensitivity and Auto-Tuning Capability of UHF RFID Chip. Application to Temperature Sensing

In this paper, a UHF RFID temperature sensing tag is introduced. The sensing operation combines the antenna sensitivity and an RFID chip with the capability of auto-tuning. The temperature variations have an impact on the substrate properties allowing the temperature to be transduced into a mismatch between the antenna and the RFID chip. This work proposes an original approach which relies on the usage of an RFID chip which offers an auto-tune capability, in this case the Impinj-Monza R6. The principle is to exploit this option in order to evaluate the temperature value sensed by the tag in the RFID reader's end. The proposed RFID sensor tag is completely passive, exceeds a read range of 9 meters and has a small size $57\times 15\times 1.27\ (mm^{3})$.