A Thickened-and-Widened Feed Dipole Antenna with an Inductive Matching Loop for a Printed UHF RFID Tag

In this paper, we present an economical thickened-and-widened feed dipole antenna design with an inductive matching loop for a printed UHF RFID tag application. The proposed antenna structure is divided into 3 sections: feed, arm, and matching loop sections. The feed areas of the proposed antenna structure are made wider and thicker in order to maintain good read-range performance, while the arm and matching loop sections are made smaller and thinner to lower conductive ink consumption. The proposed economical design can deliver comparable read-range performance as the conventional flat dipole antenna design with inductive matching, but it requires considerably less amount of conductive ink to fabricate. In the numerical results, here nearly as much as 70% of the total amount of conductive ink consumption can be saved.