Design of Ink-Printed RFID Tags for Electronic Article Surveillance Systems

Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tag plays an important role in securing products and managing inventory in the new era of global trade. The current cost of the conventional fabrication method of EAS tags forms the bottleneck that prevents pervasive item-level security. However, emerging ink-printed electronics suggests a promising method to reduce the cost of an EAS tag. This paper aims to determine the dominant factors that affect the performance of conductive ink printed EAS tags operating at 8.2 MHz. First, an EAS tag is designed using High Frequency Structural Simulator (HFSS), which includes a square spiral inductor and a capacitor. We evaluate the performance of the tag in terms of resonant frequency and the quality factor (Q), while considering different values for length of spiral inductor coil and ink thickness. Simulation results reveal that the tag with lambda/50 as the length of spiral inductor coil offers the highest Q factor.