A theoretical and experimental study of passive computational RFID tags

Passive computational RFID tags have in recent years created a new perspective of usability in the area of RFID. Researchers profit from the possibility to perform a closer investigation of communication characteristics such as the protocols by adapting the digital, logic communication unit. In industry, the possibility of performing simple computational tasks allows computational RFID tags to be used in wireless sensor networks, with the addition of being battery-free. This work investigates the RF front-end of 3 state-of-the-art passive computational RFID tags: AMS SL900a Dev Kit, Farsens Spider Eval, WISP 5.1. Given a module-based approach, the antenna, the power matching, the power harvesting and the load modulation are reviewed both theoretically and experimentally. The influence of certain properties, assigned to a specific module, on the overall performance is evaluated using a tag read range measurement.