Novel Design of Compact Antenna for Handheld RFID Readers

This paper proposes a small size antenna for portable RFID reader at the frequency of 2.45 GHz. A novel quadruple inverted-F antenna (QIFA) and a feed network with the same amplitude but different phases of each ports are presented. In addition, the QIFA is combined with a helical antenna for a compact size. The simulation results show that the proposed QIFA has a size of 20 × 20×8 mm³ at 2.45 GHz, with the simulated 3-dB beamwidth more than 90°. The radiation efficiency of antenna is higher than 62% at 2.45 GHz and the total gain is 0.93 dB. This mentioned antenna can be a good choice for both handheld RFID devices and WLAN applications.