High Frequency Design From June 2005 High Frequency Electronics

Copyright © 2005 Summit Technical Media

RFID TUTORIAL

A Radio-Oriented
Introduction to Radio
Frequency Identification
By Daniel M. Dobkin, Enigmatics, and
Titus Wandinger, WJ Communications

T
he once obscure operator. As radar rapidly became widely
This tutorial article presents acronym RFID used, the need for more elaborate and infor-
the history and develop- (Radio Frequency mative means of identification was apparent,
ment of RFID, with attention IDentification, the use of and transponders were quickly developed to
to the technical issues that electromagnetic waves to reply to radar illumination with a modulated
affect range, power con- identify a physical object) return signal. (In RFID parlance, these would
sumption and usability has recently been in the be active tags.) By the end of World War II, the
of this technology news in many contexts. Mark III active transponder, with mechanical
In this article, we’ll try to radio tuning and 6 response codes, was in use.
explain how that single acronym is used for a The modern aircraft transponder, developed in
number of different, but related, technologies the mid-1950s, operates at 1030/1090 MHz
with distinct characteristics, and examine and provides up to 4,096 ID codes, as well as
some of the unique analog and RF problems optional reporting of the airplane’s altitude.
encountered in designing RFID systems. Such a technology is quite sufficient for air-
plane identification, but these transponders
A Bit of History are physically large, power-hungry, expensive,
The first application we can discover and have too few ID codes available, to be used
where RFID offered compelling advantages for lower-cost applications. By the mid-1960s,
was in IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), the various approaches for identifying objects
necessity of figuring out whether an airplane using much less expensive, but much shorter-
is a good guy or a bad guy. Leaving out the range, technologies were under investigation.
moral issues, the technical problem of ascer- Very simple tags based on magnetostriction
taining the identity of a backscattered reflec- and mechanical resonance were developed for
tion arose almost as soon as radar became theft prevention; these inductively-coupled
practical in the late 1930s. There were reports tags remain widely used today.
by British pilots during the opening encoun- By the early 1970s Charles Walton had
ters of World War II that German airplanes patented a number of inductively-coupled
were rolling for no obvious reason when far identification schemes based on resonant
from adversaries and under no apparent transponders with unique resonant frequen-
threat. It was later discovered that these cies. Sterzer, Klensch, and others at RCA had
maneuvers were being used as an early form demonstrated license-plate tags using a simple
of identification; in fact, these Luftwaffe craft diode-based frequency doubler operating in the
were the world’s first passive RFID tags 8-17 GHz range. Koelle and coworkers at
(nomenclature to be explained below). A warn- Sandia National Laboratories had developed a
ing lamp in the cockpit lit when the plane was UHF scheme employing rectification of RF for
being illuminated by German radar; the pilot tag power, subcarrier modulated backscatter,
then varied the attitude of his airplane in and a flexible ID code generation capability,
order to modulate the backscattered signal the basics of today’s UHF tags and readers.
and thus indicate his nationality to the radar The road from concept to commercial reali-

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Figure 1 · Archetypal RFID system. Figure 2 · Frequency bands used for RFID systems.

ty has, however, been long and often used in the manufacture of large sys- gy into the awareness of the commu-
difficult, the primary obstacle being tems like automobiles or golf carts. nications industry and, to a lesser
the cost of tags and readers. A 1973 By the late 1990s, driven primari- extent, the general public. Today
article from Electronics magazine dis- ly by the decrease in cost of silicon there is considerable interest in
cusses many applications still of ICs, the cost of RFID systems had RFID, but rather less understanding
interest today for tagging vehicles: fallen to a level that enabled users to of its capabilities and limitations. In
toll collection, toll parking, dynamic envision wider applications. The the remainder of this article we shall
traffic control, vehicle identification, AutoID Laboratories were founded in undertake to clarify the types of
trucking location, and surveillance. 1999 at MIT, with cooperating labora- RFID systems and the advantages
Proposals for radio identification of tories in the UK, Australia and and challenges associated with each.
freight containers and railroad cars Japan, to explore the possibility of a
appear to date from as early as 1969. globally-unique identification system: RFID Systems and Nomenclature
Passive tags for rail cars were stan- an Internet of Things, in which every Every RFID system consists of at
dardized in the late ’80s, and by 1994 manufactured physical object, even least one interrogator, more common-
were essentially universal in the disposable consumer goods, could be ly known as a reader, which uses a
United States. Battery-powered UHF uniquely identified and readily asso- radio link to communicate with at
tags for road and bridge toll collection ciated with relevant information. least one transponder, more typically
were introduced in the late ’80s, and Sufficient progress in this direction a tag, as shown in Figure 1. The tag
are now in wide use across the United was made by the labs and industrial generally contains one or more inte-
States. A sophisticated traffic man- sponsors to induce the formation in grated circuits, and a unique identify-
agement system with active 2003 of EPCGlobal Incorporated, a ing number stored in non-volatile
transponders mounted in vehicles joint venture of the administrators of memory. The reader is often (though
and time-variable fees is used in the UPC (bar-code) system and EAN not always) integrated into a network
Singapore to control traffic entry into International. In late 2003, roughly in order to make efficient use of the
the downtown area. in the 1990s, the coincident with this reorganization identification data it collects.
US Department of Defense adopted from development to standardization There are three key architectural
sophisticated (and expensive) battery- and proliferation, the world’s largest parameters that determine the type
powered active radio tags to track retailer, WalMart, delivered a man- of RFID system in use: the frequency
shipping containers after paper-based date to its top-100 suppliers, requir- (practically equivalent to the mode of
tracking systems were overwhelmed ing them to provide EPCGlobal-com- coupling), the means of powering the
during the 1991 Gulf War. pliant RFID tags on all pallets and tag, and the communications protocol
Low-cost inductively-coupled tags the cases or cartons contained there- employed.
are now widely used for entry control, on by January 2005. The radio frequencies used in
and are becoming popular for other It was this mandate, later RFID systems vary widely (Figure 2).
similar applications such as ski pass- requirements from other large retail- The size of the reader and tag anten-
es and event tickets. Specialized ers, such as Tesco, Metro, and Target, nas varies by much less, as these are
applications in manufacturing and as well as related requirements from basically set by what is convenient
asset tracking became increasingly the Department of Defense and ini- for human beings. In consequence, for
popular in the 1990s: some examples tiatives by the US Food and Drug frequencies up to a few tens of MHz,
are the tracking of airline food carts Administration, that catapulted the- the antennas are much smaller than
and beer kegs, or of subassemblies formerly anonymous RFID technolo- the corresponding wavelength, and

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RFID TUTORIAL

Figure 4 · Simulated received signal strength at

Figure 3 · Simulated mutual inductance between a 25 cm 915 MHz; transmitter 1 meter above floor, 2 meters
reader coil antenna and a 2.5 cm tag antenna coil. from walls; cubical room 10 × 14 × 3 meters.

coupling between the reader and tag in an unpredictable fashion, giving between these two frequencies). The
is inductive in nature. rise to localized variations in RF wavelength is around 2,000 meters,
Inductive coupling is character- power (fading) over lateral displace- so these systems are always induc-
ized by the mutual inductance of the ments comparable to a wavelength. A tively coupled. Typical read ranges
reader and tag antennas: a current in simulation of received signal strength are around 1 meter. A photograph of
one induces a voltage in the other. in a simplified indoor environment is a low-frequency tag is shown in
The mutual inductance is high when shown in Figure 4, where signal Figure 5; this is a glass-encased tag
coil antennas are placed close to one strength is seen to vary by 10 dB or that can be implanted into living ani-
another, but falls much more rapidly more for small displacements in posi- mals for identification and tracking.
than the inverse square of distance tion when the receiver is more than a Because the frequency is so low, coils
when the separation becomes large meter or so from the transmitter, with with multiple turns and in some
compared to the size of the antennas variations increasing with distance. cases ferrite cores are used to
(Figure 3). As a consequence, some tags may increase the voltage induced in the
As a consequence, inductive RFID be successfully read from many tag; for example, the tag in Figure 5
systems work reliably when the read- meters away from the reader, while has about 118 turns in the sensing
er and tag are close to one another, neighboring tags may receive little coil. Such complex multi-turn coils
but read range is generally limited to power from the reader. Fading can be are hard to manufacture, setting a
a distance roughly comparable to the a bigger problem than for more famil- lower limit on the cost of LF tags.
diameter of the reader antenna. iar portable radios such as cellular The data rate of
Large reader antennas have large phones or WiFi clients because inex- LF tags is low,
inductances and increased voltages, pensive passive tags have no power because the funda-
but the practical limit on antenna source of their own and little compu- mental frequency is
size is usually about 50 cm, providing tational ability. Passive tags have low: 10% bandwidth
read ranges of around 1 meter. very limited link budgets and most of at 1 bit/Hz only pro-
For frequencies of hundreds of the arsenal of radio weaponry—inter- vides 12 kbps, and
MHz to several GHz, the wavelength leaving, error-correcting codes, pro- actual throughput is
becomes comparable to the size of typ- cessing gain—cannot be used. on the order of 1
ical antennas, and antennas can radi- These distinctions in the physics kbps once overhead
ate efficiently. Power therefore falls as of coupling between the tag and read- for powering the
the inverse square of the distance, so er give rise to differing characteris- tags is accounted for.
that operation at longer ranges can be tics and different applications for the Thus, LF tags are
envisioned. However, the propagation several frequency bands. Low-fre- inappropriate for
environment also becomes much more quency (LF) tags typically operate at Figure 5 · A applications involv-
complex, as reflections from building 125/134 kHz (communications are g l a s s - e n - ing very fast reads
features and nearby objects interfere often via frequency-shift keying cased LF tag. or large data sets.

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The skin depth for 125-kHz radiation in solutions of

conductivity around 5 mS/cm (roughly typical of tissues
and dilute aqueous salt solutions) is about 2 meters: that
is, these frequencies readily penetrate water and tissue.
For aluminum, the skin depth is around 0.2 mm, enough
to penetrate thin layers of foil or metallized packaging but
not bulk metals. Low-frequency tags can be read inside
animals or people, and can thus be used for animal identi-
fication. Low-frequency tags are also widely used for low-
data-rate, short-range applications such as automobile
ignition key fobs and payment authentication.
High-frequency (HF) tags typically use the 13.56 MHz
industrial band, available in essentially all jurisdictions.
The wavelength in this case is about 20 meters, so most
practical antennas still operate in the inductive coupling
regime; thus maximum read range is again typically
around a meter for a large antenna, less for smaller coils.
Data rates are no longer limited by fundamental frequen-
cy but by regulatory limitations, and tens of kbps can be
achieved. Because induced voltage is proportional to fre-
quency, a 13 MHz tag receives a much larger induced volt-
age than a 125 kHz tag and needs fewer turns. A typical
configuration uses 4-8 turns of a coil a few cm in diameter,
and can be readily fabricated using lithographic tech-
niques. Thus the tags can be mass-produced in credit-card-
sized form factors, and are widely employed for access con-
trol, ticketing, smart-cards, and asset tagging. Skin depth
at this frequency is about 20 cm in conductive aqueous
solutions so some body penetration is possible, though
tags in contact with tissue may be detuned by capacitive
effects.
Ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags are typically config-
ured for use at 860-960 MHz, though 2.4 GHz tags are also
used. At these frequencies, wavelength is about 33 cm,
quite comparable to reader and tag antenna sizes, so UHF
tags operate in the radiative regime and can have long
ranges. For the low-cost passive tags popular in supply-

Figure 6 · Examples of commercial UHF RFID tags.

 region during at least
one interrogation.
Radiative coupling
and consequence long
propagation range
also exposes UHF
readers to interfer-
ence from nearby
readers and other
devices operating in
unlicensed bands.
Unlike the 13-MHz
band, operation near
900 MHz competes
with many licensed
and unlicensed appli-
Figure 7 · UHF tag architectures. cations, including cel-
lular telephony and
mobile radio. The reg-
chain applications, ranges of 3 meters ulatory situation is very complex,
are typical and 10 meters achievable. with each jurisdiction allowing a dif-
Data rates of 50-150 kbps are typical, ferent band or bands for RFID opera-
and the new second-generation stan- tion, and regulations are still in flux
dards envision tag data rates of hun- in many key regions.
dreds of kbps. Where does a tag receive the DC
Efficient antennas are most read- power to run the integrated circuit
ily constructed with dimensions on that contains its identification infor-
the order of a half of the wavelength, mation? How does it transmit a sig-
in this case around 15 cm, an incon- nal back to the reader? There are
veniently large size for many desir- three approaches to solving these
able applications. It is possible to problems, with differing cost-perfor-
compress the linear dimension by mance tradeoffs (Figure 7).
bending the conductive regions, or Passive tags, such as those depict-
using large-area structures, though ed in Figure 6, have neither a battery
inevitably with some compromise in nor a radio transmitter. Power to
radiation resistance and thus perfor- operate the tag IC is obtained by rec-
mance. At these frequencies tags are tifying RF energy intercepted by the
also sensitive to environmental tag antenna. The IC power required
effects, and optimal designs may is typically some tens to a few hun-
change depending on the material to dred microwatts, greatly in excess of
which the tag is to be attached. Thus the threshold for detection for a con-
a wide variety of antenna configura- ventional radio link operating at sim-
tions are available; some are shown ilar data rates. (For example, a 1
in Figure 6. Mbps WiFi radio generally has a sen-
Because UHF tags and readers sitivity of around –90 dBm or 1×10-12
operate in a radiatively-coupled watt.) Thus the forward-link-limited
mode, tag-reader communication is range of a passive tag is a few meters
not simply dependent on distance to perhaps 15 meters depending on
(Figure 4); any particular tag can be the radiated power and antenna
in a fade and fail to respond to a gain. A parallel channel with shorter
reader inquiry. The tag, reader, or time constants rectifies part of the
both, may move during read opera- received signal to extract the ampli-
tions in an attempt to ensure that the tude-modulated information from the
tag will be in a high-signal-strength reader. Since there is no coherent fre-
 High Frequency Design
RFID TUTORIAL

quency conversion and limited amplification available, nance-free and have long field lifetimes.
tag receive sensitivity is also greatly inferior to that of a Semi-passive (or semi-active) tags are equipped with a
conventional radio, but the expensive and power-hungry battery to provide power for the integrated circuit(s), but
components of a conventional receiver (synthesizer, still use backscattered communications to avoid a radio
mixer, LNA, etc.) are avoided. Finally, the tag does not transmitter. A typical semi-passive tag used in road
transmit its own signal to the reader, but simply modu- tolling is depicted in Figure 8. Semi-passive tags can
lates the signal that its antenna backscatters by changing achieve longer ranges, generally limited by reader receive
the antenna impedance. In this fashion, the tag need only sensitivity: tens to as much as 100 meters are realistic.
provide a switching function operating at a modest rate Read reliability is greatly enhanced, since the tag no
comparable to the data rate (a few hundred kbps), rather longer depends on the reader to remain powered. Semi-
than requiring oscillators, amplifiers, and mixers operat- passive tags can be integrated with sensing capability.
ing at 900 MHz. However, the resulting power received at However, batteries must be replaced periodically,
the reader is dependent on the fourth rather than the sec- although life of up to 5 years is achieved by careful design
ond power of the distance: Prec (1/r4), and falls off very and shut-down of most circuitry when no interrogator is
rapidly, so that receive-limited range may also be only a present. Semi-passive tags are much larger and more
few tens of meters. expensive than passive tags, on the order of US$10-30.
The limited power available to the IC also limits the Active tags are architecturally-conventional radios,
amount of information that can be stored and the amount using a battery to power a transmitter and receiver and
of computational power available: passive tags can’t be well as the IC. A typical active tag is shown in Figure 9.
expected to deal with the array of methods used in con- The resulting performance improvements allow for
ventional radios to ameliorate noise and fading, such as ranges of hundreds of meters in unlicensed outdoor oper-
interleaving, convolutional coding, or phase-shift-keyed ation, but size and cost are very high, making active tags
modulations. Finally, since there is no power available appropriate only for marking expensive assets or tracking
except when the tag is illuminated, it is difficult to inte- people. To minimize power usage, active tags often trans-
grate any sensing capability with the tags. mit infrequent short bursts, using pseudonoise-coded
The benefit obtained from all the sacrifices in perfor- schemes similar to code-division multiplexing (CDMA).
mance is a considerable reduction in cost and complexity. These brief bursts allow for accurate time-of-arrival mea-
Commercial tags are available today at costs as low as surements and therefore precise location of the transmit-
US$0.20 in volume, with a plausible path to costs of less ter if multiple receivers are available; active tags are
than US$0.10. Passive tags are small and thin, and can be often used to provide both identity and location of valu-
embedded in adhesive labels and other unobtrusive struc- able assets such as shipping containers in outdoor storage
tures, and since they have no battery they are mainte- yards. Because they are powered, active tags can have
large memory capacities and may also store shipping
manifests and provide sophisticated sensing and time-
stamp capability.

Summary
The major types of RFID systems have been described
in this tutorial article. Future articles are planned that
will expand on protocols, standards, tag and reader con-
struction, and some RF aspects of tag usage models.

Author Information
Dan Dobkin is a consultant and former Director of
Technical Marketing at WJ Communications. He received
a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in
1985 and has a wide range of experience in both electron-
ic device fabrication and technical marketing. He can be
reached at enigmatics@[Link]
Titus Wandinger is a Senior Applications Engineer at
Figure 8 · External and Figure 9 · 2.4 GHz WJ Communications. He has a BSEE from Cornell Uni-
internal images of semi- active tag, providing versity and an MS from Stanford University and has 20
passive tag used for auto- location as well as iden- years experience in the design of radio and semiconductor
mated toll collection. tification information. produts. He can be reached at [Link]@[Link].

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