Temperature and humidity levels inside pharmaceutical packaging can significantly affect the shelf life of the enclosed medications. The RFID technology in the UHF band is promising to address this issue as it permits to wirelessly monitor the inner environment at the item level. This work presents the design and experimental characterization of a miniaturized battery-less RFID sensor, able to simultaneously measure temperature and humidity. The proposed sensor includes a helical antenna and is compatible with the insertion into a capsule, similar to common drugs. A first prototype of the miniaturized sensor was realized and tested in terms of both communication and sensing performance. Despite variable boundary conditions, a reading distance greater than 40 cm was demonstrated. A realistic readability analysis under uncontrolled conditions estimated a probability of 65% to read the sensor from more than 20 cm. Furthermore, the humidity sensor performance was extensively characterized in a climate chamber through several tests, resulting in an accuracy of ±5% in the RH range 40-80% that is compliant with the requirements of several pharma applications.
{"title":"Miniaturized and Battery-Free Temperature and Humidity Sensor for Smart Pharmaceutical Packaging","authors":"Adina B. Barba;Sara Amendola;Carolina Miozzi;Donato Masi;Garry Scrivens;Karen Gibson;Joel Basford;Cecilia Occhiuzzi;Gaetano Marrocco","doi":"10.1109/JRFID.2023.3312811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JRFID.2023.3312811","url":null,"abstract":"Temperature and humidity levels inside pharmaceutical packaging can significantly affect the shelf life of the enclosed medications. The RFID technology in the UHF band is promising to address this issue as it permits to wirelessly monitor the inner environment at the item level. This work presents the design and experimental characterization of a miniaturized battery-less RFID sensor, able to simultaneously measure temperature and humidity. The proposed sensor includes a helical antenna and is compatible with the insertion into a capsule, similar to common drugs. A first prototype of the miniaturized sensor was realized and tested in terms of both communication and sensing performance. Despite variable boundary conditions, a reading distance greater than 40 cm was demonstrated. A realistic readability analysis under uncontrolled conditions estimated a probability of 65% to read the sensor from more than 20 cm. Furthermore, the humidity sensor performance was extensively characterized in a climate chamber through several tests, resulting in an accuracy of ±5% in the RH range 40-80% that is compliant with the requirements of several pharma applications.","PeriodicalId":73291,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal of radio frequency identification","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67744198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-29DOI: 10.1109/JRFID.2023.3308332
Sanaz Haddadian;J. Christoph Scheytt;Gerd vom Bögel;Thorben Grenter
We present a fully integrated radio frequency identifications transponder chip operating at 5.8 GHz, which is compatible with the class-1 generation-2 of the Electronic Product Code protocol (EPC-C1 G2). The tag chip including the analog front-end and the digital baseband processor, are designed in the sub-threshold regime (0.5 V) with a total supply current of less than $50~mu text{A}$ . As a power scavenging unit, a single-stage differential-drive rectifier structure is designed and fabricated with standard threshold voltage (SVT) MOS elements in a commercial 65-nm CMOS process, to provide 0.8 V of rectified voltage. Measurements performed on the fabricated single-stage structure show a maximum power conversion efficiency of 69.6% for a 22 $text{k}Omega $ load and a sensitivity of −12.5 dBm, which corresponds to more than 1 m of reading range. The power conversion efficiency at this range is about 64%.
{"title":"A Sub-Threshold Microwave RFID Tag Chip, Compatible With RFID MIMO Reader Technology","authors":"Sanaz Haddadian;J. Christoph Scheytt;Gerd vom Bögel;Thorben Grenter","doi":"10.1109/JRFID.2023.3308332","DOIUrl":"10.1109/JRFID.2023.3308332","url":null,"abstract":"We present a fully integrated radio frequency identifications transponder chip operating at 5.8 GHz, which is compatible with the class-1 generation-2 of the Electronic Product Code protocol (EPC-C1 G2). The tag chip including the analog front-end and the digital baseband processor, are designed in the sub-threshold regime (0.5 V) with a total supply current of less than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$50~mu text{A}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. As a power scavenging unit, a single-stage differential-drive rectifier structure is designed and fabricated with standard threshold voltage (SVT) MOS elements in a commercial 65-nm CMOS process, to provide 0.8 V of rectified voltage. Measurements performed on the fabricated single-stage structure show a maximum power conversion efficiency of 69.6% for a 22 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$text{k}Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> load and a sensitivity of −12.5 dBm, which corresponds to more than 1 m of reading range. The power conversion efficiency at this range is about 64%.","PeriodicalId":73291,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal of radio frequency identification","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/7433271/10004382/10233935.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"62285523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper describes an effective method for improving the detection of UHF RFID (Ultra High Frequency Radio Frequency Identification) tags in a restricted area. The so-called zoning technique is a recurring problem in practical RFID applications: it consists in detecting within an environment with multiple tags that are exclusively present in the zone of interest. The proposed method is based on the concept of Nth harmonic, a new paradigm that involves utilizing the harmonic signals backscattered by tags. Such a method is coupled with a machine learning technique. Experimental results show the importance of harmonic features for better tags zoning. Using a four-layer CNN classifier, we can achieve 99% prediction accuracy by leaving a keep-out distance of 0.5 m between two zones, using the harmonic RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) sum feature, and 94.7% by using the best feature at $f_{0}$