Design and characterization of novel fabric-based multi-resonators for wearable chipless RFID applications

Nowadays, the chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is attracting significant attention owing to its immense potential in tracking. However, most of the chipless tags are fabricated on hard printed circuit boards, and the wearable fabric-based chipless tag is still in the research stage. In this paper, a symmetrical 3(rd) L-shaped multi-resonator wearable chipless RFID tag is designed and screen-printed onto fabric. In order to investigate the influence of the non-uniform conductive layer on the signal transmission at high frequency, the surface and cross-sectional topographies of the printed conductive film are analyzed and the frequency response characteristics are simulated and measured. The obtained results show that the common fabric can be used as the substrate to screen print the L-shaped multi-resonators of the chipless RFID tag, and the quality of the screen printed line, especially a narrow line, significantly affects the radio frequency performance. For the screen-printed 3(rd) L-shaped stub resonators, the relative frequency shift compared with the simulation results are 0.99%, 0.88% and 2.26%, respectively. Generally, the surface morphology of fabric and screen-printed precision are critical in improving the performance of L-shaped multi-resonators.