Advanced Chipless RFID

CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTION

The area of contactless identification systems is growing rapidly into a multibillion dollar market. It covers a broad range of applications including supply chain management, manufacturing, and distribution services. Examples of these applications include consumer packaged goods, postal items, drugs, books, airbag management, animal tracking, pharmaceuticals, waste disposal, clothes, defense, smart tickets, people tracking such as prisoners, hospital patients, patients in care homes, and leisure visitors as shown in Figure 1.1. Tough trading conditions due to the global competition strive industries to attain more process efficiencies. Therefore, effective goods tracking systems are required to assist the implementation of the modern management system.

Figure 1.1 Application areas of identification systems.

In general terms, any application that involves object identification, tracking, navigation, or surveillance would benefit from an identification system. Several hundred billion tags per year are required by this wide area of applications [1].

In this market, every application has its own technical and financial specifications. Main applications, those that need a huge number of tags, require high data encoding capacity and survive only with a very cheap tag solution. For others, secure identification and antitheft tagging is more important. In some ...