Keynote Speech: "RFID Readers And Tags: When Antennas Matter

October 6, 2021, 20:30 (Delhi time)

Prof. Paolo Nepa

University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

 

Abstract

In the last decades, many scientific papers and book chapters have been devoted to present different layouts and technologies for RFID antennas, for both tags and readers. Also, plenty of tags with different shape and size can be found in the market, including inlay tags, textile tags and platform-tolerant tags, to mention a few. A large choice of COTS reader antennas is available as well. Then, the arising question is as follows: what is the actual need for novel antennas in current standardized RFID systems?

While keeping above question in mind, this talk starts with a synthetic overview of the requirements and design criteria for antennas of RFID tags and readers, as well as of the main challenges that have been faced and solved by antenna designers from both academia and industry. Then, the attention is focused on some specific RFID applications where ad-hoc antennas are mandatory for the exploitation of RFID technology in emergent scenarios. As an example, the talk will address the advantages of near-field focused antennas for warehouse portals, the issues arising when looking for an RFID printer-encoder antenna, the tests on tag antennas that are expected to work properly even when attached on hot items, the design of reader antennas suitable for integration into industrial machines, the arising challenges when trying to shape and bound the electromagnetic field in the reactive near-field region of a reader antenna for item-level RFIDs.

Finally, it is also worth mentioning that antennas improving the effectiveness and reliability of RFID systems may providea key contribution towards the massive application of this automatic identification technology in Industry 4.0 and IoT scenarios.

 

Short biography

Paolo Nepa received the Laurea (Doctor) degree in electronics engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1990. Since 1990, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa, where he is currently a Full Professor. He co-authored more than300 international journal papers and international conference contributions. His main research interests are in the design of antennas for wireless communication systems, as well as in the design of antennas optimized for near-field coupling and focusing. In the context of UHF-RFID systems, he is working on techniques for radiolocalization of either tagged objects or readers. He has been a member of the local organizing committee of the 2004URSI EMTS, Pisa, Italy. He serves as a member of the Technical Advisory Board of URSI Commission B – Fields and Waves. Since 2016, he serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letter. He has been the General Chair of the international conference IEEE RFID-TA 2019, Pisa, Italy.

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Keynote Speech: "On RFID-based Human Activity Sensing"

October 7, 2021, 20:30 (Delhi time)

Prof. Shiwen Mao

IEEE Fellow, Professor and Earle C. Williams Eminent Scholar Chair, Director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center

Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

 

Abstract

With the rapid development of radio frequency (RF) sensing in the Internet of Things (IoT), human activity sensing, detection and tracking have attracted increasing attention. Among the various RF sensing techniques, radio-frequency identification (RFID) has its unique advantages of low-cost, small form factor, battery-free, and robustness to surrounding interference. Beyond its original use of responding with the stored Electronic Product Code (EPC) data when interrogated by a reader, RFID tags can be used as wearable sensors on the human body for vital sign and activity sensing applications. In this talk, we will investigate the various technical challenges on fully exploiting RFID for human activity recognition and tracking, such as frequency hopping and noisy and sparse RFID data, and examine potential solutions. We will then review several our recently works on RFID based human vital sign monitoring, drowsy driving detection, and 3D human pose monitoring and tracking.

 

Short Biography

SHIWEN MAO received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY. He held the McWane Endowed Professorship from 2012 to 2015 and the Samuel Ginn Endowed Professorship from 2015 to 2020 in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn University, Auburn, AL. Currently, he is a professor and Earle C. Williams Eminent Scholar Chair, and Director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center (WEREC) at Auburn University. His research interest includes wireless networks, multimedia communications, and smart grid. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Council of RFID, and is on the Editorial Board of IEEE TWC, IEEE TNSE, IEEE TMC, IEEE IoT, IEEE OJ-ComSoc, IEEE/CIC China Communications, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Network, IEEE Networking Letters, and ACM GetMobile. He received the IEEE ComSoc TC-CSR Distinguished Technical Achievement Award in 2019 and NSF CAREER Award in 2010. He is a co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE Communications Society Outstanding Paper Award, the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society 2020 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award, the 2004 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize in the Field of Communications Systems, and several conference best paper awards. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

 

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RFID Special Guests

 

Keynote Speech: “The history and evolution of RAIN RFID tag antennas”

October 8, 2021, 18:15 (Delhi time)

 

KVS Rao, Pavel Nikitin, John Kim

 

Abstract

RAIN (UHF) RFID is a popular technology based on passive modulated backscatter, with applications ranging from supply chain and retail to vehicle identification and healthcare. In this talk, we will cover the history of RFID tag antennas and their evolution, from simpler designs that maximize read range on specific material to wideband tags designed to operate on various items and meet ARC requirements, which are industry tag certification specifications. We will also discuss tag antenna modeling and simulation approaches and discuss the latest research developments in tag antenna design.

 

 

Short biography

KVS Rao received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India and subsequently joined the faculty. During his stay at IIT, Kharagpur he contributed on various antenna hardware projects from defense and aerospace in the area of Microwaves and phased arrays. In 1988, he was on sabbatical leave from IIT as a Research Associate with the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada. In 1993, he joined Antenna Research Associates, Beltsville, MD, where he was involved with the design and development of antennas. Later he moved to T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY, as a Research Staff Member, where he was involved with RFID. In 1998, he joined the Intermec Technologies Corporation, Everett, WA, as one of the core team members with the RFID technologies acquired from IBM. He is currently working with Impinj Corporation, where he also manages a small group in the area of RFID transponder design and development. He coauthored a book “Millimeter Wave Microstrip and Printed Circuit Antennas” (Norwood, MA: Artech House, 1991.  He is joint inventor for around 25 issued US patents in antennas and systems. During last 25+ years he delivered few invited talks, conducted courses, presented, and published papers on RFID at IEEE and other international symposia. He jointly published around 60 technical articles including conferences in various referred journals like IEEE in the area of RF and antennas.

 

Pavel V. Nikitin received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, in 2002. He worked at Honeywell, Intermec, the University of Washington, IBM, and Ansys. He is currently a Senior Staff Antenna Designer with Impinj, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA, where he is involved into research and development of RFID products. He is also an Affiliate Associate Professor with the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington. He authored multiple IEEE technical publications, has several best paper conference awards, and holds many U.S. and European patents. 

 

  John Kim is currently a senior staff antenna engineer at Impinj. He completed his bachelor and master’s degree at Virginia Tech. His focus was on EM wave propagation and antennas. He joined Impinj in 2008 and had been designing reference tag antennas for Impinj Monza End IC products and custom and special purpose tags antennas designs for customers.