This vital new resource offers engineers and researchers a window on important new technology that will supersede the barcode and is destined to change the face of logistics and product data handling. In the last two decades, radio-frequency identification has grown fast, with accelerated take-up of RFID into the mainstream through its adoption by key users such as Wal-Mart, K-Mart and the US Department of Defense. RFID has many potential applications due to its flexibility, capability to operate out of line of sight, and its high data-carrying capacity. Yet despite optimistic projections of a market worth $25 billion by 2018, potential users are concerned about costs and investment returns. Clearly demonstrating the need for a fully printable chipless RFID tag as well as a powerful and efficient reader to assimilate the tag’s data, this book moves on to describe both. Introducing the general concepts in the field including technical data, it then describes how a chipless RFID tag can be made using a planar disc-loaded monopole antenna and an asymmetrical coupled spiral multi-resonator. The tag encodes data via the “spectral signature” technique and is now in its third-generation version with an ultra-wide band (UWB) reader operating at between 5 and 10.7GHz.
