An RFID Antenna design for multi-layered printed circuit board applications

A passive RFID antenna for multi-layered printed circuit board (PCB) is proposed in this paper. At present most conventional RFID tags cannot be easily attached to a PCB, because the complicated metal planes and wires on a PCB may degrade seriously the radiation properties of RFID tags. The deterioration will greatly reduce the available read distance. Therefore, we propose an RFID antenna fabricated on PCB. Two slots are created on the power and ground planes and the RFID chip is connected over the slot on the ground plane. To get better power transmission between an antenna and a chip and to re-radiate back more power, the conjugate matching method is adopted to design the RFID antenna. According to simulation results, the available read distance is about 18 cm and the size is 30 mm by 20 mm. The small size enhances its use in PCB applications.