Comparative study of inkjet and thermal printing for fabrication of passive UHF RFID tags

The need for novel substrate materials and optimized additive manufacturing methods is growing fast as new applications are developed constantly, especially along the emerging paradigm of the Internet of Things. This paper presents a comparison of thermal and inkjet printing for the fabrication of passive UHF RFID tag antennas on commonly used polyimide (Kapton) and on novel polyester-based substrate (Flexcon THERMLfilm) materials. The optimized printing parameters are studied for both substrates using thermal-printed aluminum and inkjet-printed silver materials. Two different tag antenna designs are printed using both methods and their performance is evaluated through wireless tag measurements. According to the measurement results, both printing methods can be used to effectively fabricate passive UHF RFID tag antennas. In addition, the ease of fabrication, the flexibility of printing parameters, and the compatibility with different substrate materials of the two printing methods are studied and discussed in this paper.