The 11th IEEE International Conference

IEEE RFID-TA 2021

October 6-8, 2021, Delhi, India

RFID Readers And Tags: When Antennas Matter

Keynote Speech

RFID Readers And Tags: When Antennas Matter

Prof. Paolo Nepa, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
 

Abstract
In the last decades, many scientific papers and book chapters have been devoted to present different layouts and technologies forRFID antennas, for both tags and readers. Also, plenty of tags with different shape and size can be found in the market, including inlay tags, textile tags and platform-tolerant tags, to mention a few.A large choice of COTS reader antennas is availableas well. Then, the arising question is as follows: what is the actual need for novel antennas in current standardized RFID systems?

While keeping above question in mind, this talk starts with a synthetic overview of the requirements and design criteria for antennas of RFID tags and readers, as well as of the main challenges that have been faced and solved by antenna designers from both academia and industry. Then, the attention is focused on some specific RFID applications where ad-hoc antennas are mandatory for the exploitation of RFID technology in emergent scenarios. As an example, the talk will address the advantages of near-field focused antennas for warehouse portals, the issues arising when looking for an RFID printer-encoder antenna, the tests on tag antennas that are expected to work properly even when attached on hot items, the design of reader antennas suitable for integration into industrial machines, the arising challenges when trying to shape and bound the electromagnetic field in the reactive near-field region of a reader antenna for item-level RFIDs.

Finally, it is also worth mentioningthat antennas improvingthe effectiveness and reliability of RFID systems may providea key contribution towards the massive application of this automatic identification technology in Industry 4.0 and IoT scenarios.

Short biography

Paolo Nepa received the Laurea (Doctor) degree in electronics engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1990. Since 1990, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa, where he is currently a Full Professor. He co-authored more than300 international journal papers and international conference contributions. His main research interests are in the design of antennas for wireless communication systems, as well as in the design of antennas optimized for near-field coupling and focusing. In the context of UHF-RFID systems, he is working on techniques for radiolocalization of either tagged objects or readers. He has been a member of the local organizing committee of the 2004URSI EMTS, Pisa, Italy. He serves as a member of the Technical Advisory Board of URSI Commission B – Fields and Waves. Since 2016, he serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letter. He has been the General Chair of the international conference IEEE RFID-TA 2019, Pisa, Italy.