Design, Fabrication and Testing of a Multifrequency Microstrip RFID Tag Antenna on Si

Abstract

A configurable design of a microstrip square spiral RFID tag antenna, for a wide range of microwave frequencies in the S- and C-band, is presented. The design is parameterized in dimensions, and hence changing the design frequency (or frequencies) is easy, by changing only an initial value for the spiral geometry. A tag specimen was fabricated using a Cu electroplating technique according to the design for frequencies of interest in the areas of 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. The substrate material is 320 μm high-resistivity Si and the bridge dielectric is 15 μm polyimide PI2525. The steps of the microfabrication process involve metallic structure pattern transfer techniques with optical UV lithography procedures. The reflection coefficient and antenna gain of the specimen were measured inside an anechoic enclosure using a vector network analyzer (VNA) and a TEM horn test antenna over a frequency range of up to 6 GHz. Simulated and measured results, exhibiting reasonable agreement, are presented and discussed.