Long range battery-less PV-powered RFID tag sensors
Sai Nithin R. Kantareddy, Ian Mathews, Rahul Bhattacharyya, Ian Marius, Peters, Tonio Buonassisi, and Sanjay E. Sarma

TL;DR
This paper introduces PV-powered RFID tags that significantly extend communication range and enable persistent sensing without batteries, using low-cost photovoltaic technology to overcome energy limitations of passive RFID systems.
Contribution
The paper demonstrates a novel PV augmentation approach for passive RFID tags, achieving 8x longer range and battery-free persistent sensing capabilities with minimal additional electronics.
Findings
PV-RFID read range increased 8 times
Tags can transmit over 0.14 million measurements daily
Good agreement between theoretical estimates and experimental results
Abstract
Communication range in passive Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) front-end devices is a critical barrier in the real-world implementation of this low-cost technology. Purely passive RFID tags power up by harvesting the limited RF energy transmitted by the interrogator, and communicate by backscattering the incident signal. This mode of communication keeps manufacturing costs below a few cents per tag, but the limited power available at the tag undermines long-range deployment. In this paper, we present an approach to use Photovoltaics (PV) to augment the available energy at the tag to improve read range and sensing capabilities. We provide this extra-energy to the RFID integrated circuit (IC) using minimum additional electronics yet enabling persistent sensor-data acquisition. Current and emerging thin-film PV technologies have significant potential for being very low-cost, hence…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
