Time-domain measurement of time-coded UWB chipless RFID tags

Abstract

Chipless ultra-wideband (UWB) has been proposed as a low-cost alternative for radiofrequency identification (RFID). In this paper, a comprehensible theoretical introduction to time-domain operation of a UWB RFID tag is described, and a circuit model is proposed. For commercial applications low-cost RFID readers are demanded. To this end, this paper addresses the measurement of time-coded UWB chipless tags for RFID in time domain. Two different setups to detect time-coded tags are presented, one based on commercial UWB impulse radar (IR) and the other based on a vector network analyzer (VNA). The experimental results show the feasibility of using an IR-UWB radar as a UWB RFID reader, achieving very good read ranges.