Design of an UHF RFID Tag Antenna with a Paper Substrate

In this paper, the well-known high frequency structure simulator (HFSS) is used to design an ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio-frequency-identification (RFID) tag antenna with a paper substrate. With the continuous development of RFID technology, various factors of designing RFID tags have been investigated such as the substrate material, tag shape, working frequency band, and impedance matching. In the design of passive tag antenna, the impedance matching, broadband, and miniaturization are the main difficulties. We use a special structure to improve the performance of passive tag antenna and an UHF RFID tag antenna with a paper substrate is proposed for near-field applications. The tag antenna uses a matching network to achieve the impedance matching and employs a first-order Hilbert fractal structure to reduce the size. The overall size of the antenna is 63.6mm x 25mm and the operation band is from 881.9 MHz to 962.2 MHz which can cover the UHF RFID bands of many countries. Its good performance is verified by HFSS simulation and measurement.