Design of Compact and Auto-Compensated Single-Layer Chipless RFID Tag

This paper presents a new radio frequency identification (RFID) chipless tag that is highly compact and potentially low-cost. This tag has a lot of advantages, such as being fully printable on products since no ground plane is needed for fabrication. The actual issue of the chipless tag family having a single layer, that is, their detuning effect, is compensated for the first time by a correction technique based on the use of a sensing resonator. The design is based on multiple λ/4 coplanar strip-line resonators where resonant frequencies can be shifted by setting an additional short circuit at particular locations. An accurate model is proposed to easily link the footprint of the structure to the resonant frequency. Considering a frequency resolution of 50 MHz for the reading system and a tag dimension of 15 × 20 mm², 9 b can be encoded in the frequency band 2.0-5.5 GHz. Several experimental results validate the proposed design as well as its implementation in a realistic application and environment.