Survey of range improvement of commercial RFID tags with Power Optimized Waveforms

The power sensitivity of passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags heavily affects the read reliability and range. Inventory tracking systems rely heavily on strong read reliability while animal tracking in large fields rely heavily on long read range. Power Optimized Waveforms (POWs) provide a solution to improving both read reliability and read range by increasing RFID tag RF to DC power conversion efficiency. This paper presents a survey of the increases and decreases to read range of common RFID tags from Alien and Impinj with Higgs, Higgs 2, Higgs 3, Monza 3, and Monza 4 RFICs. In addition, POWs are explained in detail with examples and methods of integration into a reader.