Reconfigurable UHF RFID tag with sensing capabilities

The pervasiveness of RFID in application fields commonly prerogative of other technologies is related to the addition of sensor and computational capabilities to the systems. This paper presents a smart RFID tag based on a custom designed microchip, able to transmit wirelessly the information coming from a series of integrated sensors and complying with part of the RFID UHF EPC-Gen2 standard, developed implementing the state machine on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. The solution provided aims to demonstrate the feasibility to create augmented RFID tags useful in several applications such as a safer and more manageable food supply chain of perishable comestibles, or biomedical sensor data transmitters. The solution conceived, thanks to the possible miniaturization of the FPGA IC, is a practical solution to obtain compact, small size and low cost devices for short range applications. The FPGA-based implementation ensures a low-cost alternative to dedicated ASIC design for achieving high-end features such as bi-directional communication, anti-collision and on-board computational power.