Conclusions and Future Works

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the conclusions and proposed the future works that can be conducted in order to improve the performance of the chipless RFID tag and RFID readers used to detect the tag.

The content of this book has been concerned with the design of chipless RFID tags and RFID readers for low cost item tracking. The growing tendency today is to replace the barcodes with RFID tags. Knowing the limitation of the optical barcode, RFID provides unique ID codes for individual items that can be read at a longer distance. Hence, the obstacles of reading range and automation would be addressed by the use of RFID. However, the cost of RFID tags makes them unaffordable as an alternative to barcodes.

In recent years, chipless RFID has been proposed as a low cost and competitive replacement for the barcode. The recently reported chipless RFID tags are printed resonators [59], chemical fibres [53] and TFTC [49] organic tags. However, these reported chipless tags have been stagnating in the prototyping stage and have limitations in terms of reading range, size, data capacity, data encoding, frequency of operation and finally, fabrication challenges. As for an example, printed resonators have size restrictions, chemical fibres have reading ranges up to a couple of millimetres, while TFTC has very low electron mobility and can only operate in the kHz range and at best MHz frequency range.

Another aspect of chipless RFID system development, which has been ignored so far by researchers, is the design of RFID readers for chipless tags. Since the chipless RFID tags use unconventional methods for data encoding, such as spectral signatures, conventional “off-the-shelf” RFID readers are not suitable for the new development. Hence, the RFID readers were needed to be developed from scratch.

In response to this situation, the research/design work accomplished in this book has concentrated on the design and development of low cost, fully printable chipless RFID tags and dedicated RFID readers. The chipless RFID system is to be used for tagging the Australian polymer banknote in a conveyor belt setup. Two varieties of chipless RFID tags, on conventional Taconic TLX-0 laminate and thin flexible Taconic TF-290 laminate, have been designed and tested. A chipless RFID tag—reader system which can detect the tag has been presented.