Design and Performance Analysis of a Chemically-Etched Flexible NFC Tag Antenna

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, chemical etching fabrication, and performance evaluation of flexible NFC antennas suitable for wearables, demonstrating improved read range and user experience through experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel chemical etching process for fabricating flexible NFC antennas based on mathematical models, with experimental validation of performance improvements.

Findings

Longer read range achieved

Shorter connection time observed

Successful fabrication on flexible materials

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a perfect example of ubiquitous computing that is secured, short-ranged, low-powered contactless communication. High demand is predicted for NFC, especially with wearables, and the variety of applications may require that this technology be fabricated onto different materials. In this research, we first designed flexible NFC antennas based on mathematical models. A simulation of the NFC coil inductance was performed and verified using the predictive models. Later, two flexible NFC antennas, including 160x80 mm2 (rectangular) and 80x80 mm2 (square) were fabricated through a chemical etching process and verified at 13.56 MHz frequency. Two experiments 1) Read range detection and 2) User experience study on 22 participants validate longer read range and shorter connection time of our fabricated flexible NFC tags.