IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 58, NO.

10, OCTOBER 2009 3619

Characterization of RFID Strap

Using Single-Ended Probe
Sung-Lin Chen, Student Member, IEEE, and Ken-Huang Lin, Member, IEEE

AbstractRadio frequency identification (RFID) strap attach- The electromagnetic power from the tag antenna is maxi-
ment modality is more reliable, low cost, and easy to assemble, mally delivered to the chip when the antenna has a conjugate
and therefore, it becomes increasingly more popular in RFID impedance of the chip [2]. Since the energy interaction between
tag designs. This paper presents a single-ended probe method
with power transmission coefficient compensation for the char- the chip and the antenna is the most important issue, a suc-
acterization of RFID straps. Approximate identification of the cessful antenna design is determined by conjugate impedance
Read/Write threshold power and impedance is based on the matching between both components [3].
charge status of voltage multipliers and charge pumps instead of During an RFID tag design, the read range is the most im-
on the Read/Write-modulated commands. For comparison pur- portant performance index. The read range R can be calculated
poses, the conventional source-pull system is also briefly reviewed
and applied to verify the measurement results of absorbing power using the Friis free-space transmission formula as follows [4]:
and impedance of RFID straps using the presented method. An
enhanced source-pull system, named RFID source-pull system, for
 1/2
Pr Gr Gt
an RFID strap that can accurately measure the threshold power R= (1)
and impedance for Read/Write-modulated commands is also con- 4 Pth
structed for verifying the presented method. Alien and Texas
Instruments (TI) straps are used for measurement examples in where is the wavelength, Pr is the power transmitted by the
this paper. It is found that the measurement results of both RFID reader, Gr is the gain of the reader antenna, Gt is the gain
straps obtained by the presented method agree well with those by of the tag antenna, Pth is the minimum threshold power of
the conventional source-pull system and the RFID source-pull sys-
tem. The single-ended probe method can measure the approximate powering on the RFID chip, and is the power transmission
Read/Write threshold power and impedance of the RFID strap coefficient that will be discussed in detail later. To estimate
with minimum operating procedures; furthermore, the compli- the maximum read range of the designed tag using the Friis
cated radio frequency (RF) facilities are not required. Obtaining formula, the threshold power and chip impedance are the es-
the Read/Write threshold power and impedance of RFID straps sential parameters for the RFID tag designers. Unfortunately,
allows designers to estimate the maximum read range of the
designed RFID tag in advance. Therefore, the implemented cost RFID chip or strap manufacturers treat these parameters as
and design cycle times can substantially be reduced. confidential information in the business. They provide very
few specifications about their devices for general customers
Index TermsImpedance measurement, power transmission
coefficient, radio frequency identification (RFID), RFID strap, or research laboratories. Therefore, the RFID tag designers
RFID tags, single-ended probe. encounter great difficulties in obtaining these two parameters
before designing RFID tags. In addition to threshold power and
I. I NTRODUCTION impedance measurement issues, the strap attachment modality
becomes increasingly more popular in RFID tag designs. Under
ADIO frequency identification (RFID) is a technology
R used for object identification and has become very pop-
ular in the retail, transportation, manufacturing, and supply
this circumstance, the related measurement method should be
carried out.
In the past few years, several papers have been published on
chains [1]. The tag antenna acts as a power receiver that trans- RFID tag design. Rao et al. give an overview and a process
forms the emitted electromagnetic wave into electric energy for of antenna design for RFID tags [5]. Fang et al. introduce a
the chip, as well as a radiating source that sends out digital in- design process for broadband impedance matching for RFID
formation embedded inside the chip. For the purpose of energy tags [6]. In the design of tags based on power reflection coef-
conversion, the chip includes a charge capacitor that causes ficient analysis, Nikitin et al. apply the Smith chart based on
the chip to have additional capacitive impedance, making the Kurokawas power reflection coefficient method with measure-
tag antenna more difficult to match with the chip than with a ment impedance normalized to the real part of the impedance
general radio frequency (RF) system of purely real impedance of the source to the RFID tag design [7]. These designs require
of 50 load. that the RFID chip impedance be known in advance. However,
very few papers provide measurement methods for threshold
Manuscript received April 29, 2008; revised August 9, 2008. First
published June 16, 2009; current version published September 16, 2009. power and input impedance of the RFID chip or strap.
The Associate Editor coordinating the review process for this paper was This paper presents a simple and fast measurement method,
Dr. Sergey Kharkovsky. namely, the single-ended probe method, to measure the thresh-
The authors are with Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun
Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan (e-mail: xview@ms77.hinet.net). old power and impedance of RFID straps. In addition, an
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2009.2018697 enhanced source-pull system for RFID straps is also presented.
0018-9456/$26.00 2009 IEEE

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3620 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 58, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

It can be used to measure more accurate threshold power

and impedance of RFID straps with different RF-modulated
commands. Section II explains the conventional source-pull
system, single-ended probe method, and RFID source-pull
system for characterization of RFID straps. The measurement
and comparison results are demonstrated in Section III. Finally,
conclusions are drawn in Section IV.

II. M EASUREMENT M ETHODS FOR RFID S TRAPS

This section briefly reviews the conventional source-pull sys-
tem for impedance measurement of power-dependent devices.
The presented single-ended probe method and the RFID source-
pull system are also explained in this section.

A. Source-Pull System
For comparison purposes, the conventional load pull system
is reviewed [8][10]. The load pull system is composed of
source-pull and load-pull measurements for the input and out-
put properties of a device under test, respectively [11]. The sys-
tem is used to measure the input impedance or characteristics of
an RF device or component in which the impedance is different
from the ideal 50 or has a complex form. For the impedance
measurement of an RFID strap, only input impedance has to be
measured. Therefore, only the source-pull measurement is re-
quired for the input impedance measurement of the RFID strap.
The block diagram of measurement processes and configuration
of the conventional source-pull measurement system are shown
in Fig. 1. In a source-pull measurement, the source impedance Fig. 1. Measurement block diagrams and configuration of the conventional
source-pull system for an RFID strap.
with a minimum return loss or reflection coefficient is typically
regarded as the conjugate impedance of the device under test.
To provide more freedom of tuner adjusting, we use a triple-
stub tuner as the source tuner.
First, we probe the RFID strap with a source tuner output
and adjust the triple-stub tuner for the perfect match with
50 at the source tuner input reference plane. Second, we
remove the RFID strap and connect the second port probe to
the source tuner output. Fig. 1(a) and (b) shows block diagrams
that illustrate the first and second measurement processes, Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit model of an RFID tag.
respectively. Finally, the impedance Zso of the source tuner
output port is measured, which, ideally, is equal to the complex ended probe measurement with power transmission coefficient

conjugate of the RFID strap input impedance Zstrap = Zso . The compensation, can achieve this requirement.
main function of the source-pull measurement asserts that the Fig. 2 shows the equivalent circuit model of the RFID tag.
absorbed power of the RFID strap is equal to the RF output The circuit is with two complex impedances, namely, Zc and
power of the network analyzer, assuming that the source tuner Za , which are the chip impedance and antenna impedance,
is lossless. To find the relation curve between the absorbed respectively. In this case, the voltage- or current-basis reflection
power and impedance of RFID straps, the measurement process coefficient based on traveling waves is not suitable for use as the
should be taken repeatedly for each sweeping power. Hence, performance index of an RFID tag design. Kurokawa [12] pre-
this is a highly time-consuming process. sented the physical meaning of power waves and the properties
of the scattering matrix. The power reflection coefficient was
B. Single-Ended Probe Method for an RFID Strap defined as

Source-pull measurement is conventionally performed using  Za Zc 2

 
stub tuners that can be difficult to use and consume measure- |s|2 =   , 0 |s|2 1 (2)
Za + Zc 
ment time considerably. Hence, a simple and rapid measure-
ment method for an RFID strap will be more convenient to the where Zc = Rc + Xc is the RFID chip impedance, and Za =
RFID tag designers. The presented method, namely, the single- Ra + Xa is the RFID tag antenna impedance. To apply this

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CHEN AND LIN: CHARACTERIZATION OF RFID STRAP USING SINGLE-ENDED PROBE 3621

Fig. 3. RFID die, chip, strap, inlay, and label (or tag).

Fig. 5. Configuration of the single-ended probe method for an RFID strap.

tag antennas using a modified on-wafer probe, which usually

probes on chip for characteristic measurement. It provides a
good concept of measurement platform setup. Fig. 5 shows the
Fig. 4. Simplified equivalent circuit model of an RFID strap. configuration of the measurement platform that we use in this
paper.
concept to measure the threshold power and complex im- For the measurement of the threshold power and impedance
pedance of an RFID chip with a single-ended probe, we of an RFID strap, a simple measurement procedure is imple-
represent the power reflection coefficient as and define its mented. A single-ended probe is combined with a network
complementary coefficient, i.e., power transmission coefficient, analyzer (Agilent ENA 5071B) to perform the measurement.
( = 1 ) as Fig. 5 shows the single-ended probe measurement setup for the
RFID strap impedance measurement. The network analyzer can
4Ra Rc take an inverse transformation from the reflection coefficient to
= . (3)
[(Ra + Rc )2 + (Xa + Xc )2 ] the impedance of device under test. Therefore, the RFID strap
impedance Zstrap can be measured from the network analyzer
For complex impedance measurement applications, the directly.
power transmission coefficient is more useful than the power To measure the threshold power of an RFID strap, we sweep
reflection coefficient. the RF output power of the network analyzer from 20 to
For manufacturing considerations, increasingly more RFID 10 dBm and record the measurement data. In reality, the RF
chip manufacturers supply the customers with RFID straps output power of a network analyzer is not equal to the actual
rather than RFID chips. Fig. 3 shows RFID die, chip, strap, absorbed power of an RFID strap. Because the RFID strap is not
inlay, and label (or tag). Each RFID strap is packaged with matched with the 50- coaxial cable of the network analyzer,
an RFID chip and two terminal pads on a thin substrate. The the sweeping RF output power PRF should be corrected with
equivalent circuit of the RFID chip can be represented as either the power transmission coefficient. The absorbed power Pstrap
a parallel or a series model with a resistor and a capacitor [13]. can be compensated by the following:
Due to the terminal pads and binding interface, straps can be
represented as a series resistor and capacitor. In this paper, we Pstrap = PRF + 10 log( ) (in decibel milliwatts). (4)
simplify the equivalent circuit of the RFID strap as series model
of a resistor and a capacitor. The simplified equivalent circuit Now Pstrap is the actual absorbed power of the RFID strap.
model of the RFID strap is shown in Fig. 4. Therefore, the resistance and reactance curves related to the
For microwave design, the engineers are familiar with many actual absorbed power of RFID strap are obtained.
measurement skills for 50- devices. The majority of the RFID chips are not purely passive components but active
measured equipment are designed for measuring 50- devices; devices whose input impedances vary with absorbed power and
they are not directly applicable to measuring RFID straps. Not operating frequency [15]. The architecture of an RFID chip
only do RFID straps have complex impedance characteristic, is shown in Fig. 6. A voltage multiplier converts the incident
but they also directly bind with the chip without any connector. RF signal power into a dc voltage to provide the regulated
For RFID antenna impedance measurement, Camp et al. [14] voltage required for the operation of RFID chip. When the
present a novel impedance measurement procedure for RFID voltage multiplier is charged, the demodulator, control unit,

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3622 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 58, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

Fig. 6. Architecture of an RFID chip.

Fig. 8. Enhanced source-pull system for an RFID strap.

pump is charged; hence, we can determine the writing threshold

power Pwth and writing impedance Zwth = Rwth + jXwth of
the RFID chip at this turning point.
Therefore, the single-ended probe method can approximately
measure the threshold power and impedance for reading- and
writing-modulated commands of the RFID strap according to
the status of voltage multiplier and charge pump, respectively.
The detail measurement and comparison results are presented in
Section III. It will be demonstrated that the measurement results
of the presented method are in good agreement with the other
two measurement methods. With these parameters, designers
Fig. 7. Variation of chip impedance with absorbed power. can estimate the maximum Read/Write range of the tags with
the Friis equation before implementing their RFID tag designs.
charge pump, and modulator start running. In other words, the
RFID chip is powered on and can reply to Read commands
but not to Write commands. The resistance of RFID chips is C. RFID Source-Pull System
strongly dependent on the dc current taken from the voltage
multiplier output VDD [16]. Therefore, when the RFID chip The conventional source-pull system and single-ended probe
powers on, the input resistance shows an unusual increased method can be used to measure the impedance behavior with
status. Fig. 7 shows an illustration of the resistance curve. the absorbed power of the RFID strap, in which the threshold
After taking the difference of the resistance curve varied with powers Prth and Pwth are defined according to the charge status
the absorbed power, the reading threshold power Prth and of the voltage multiplier and charge pump. However, the RFID
reading impedance Zrth = Rrth + jXrth of the RFID chip are chip is not a purely passive component but an active device
obtained. The difference of resistance is defined as when it powers on. It includes an RF-to-dc voltage multiplier,
a demodulator, a modulator, an EEPROM, a charge pump,
Rdiff = R(n + 1) R(n) (5) and a control unit [16]. The measurement results of the RFID
chip using the conventional source-pull system or single-ended
where R(n) is the nth measurement resistance data measured probe method are the behaviors of the standby mode, and not
under different absorbed power conditions, and n is the index the turn-on state, unless the RFID chip receives the specified
of the measurement data varied with increased absorbed power. modulated commands, such as the Read or Write command. For
For the writing function, the dc output voltage of the voltage this reason, we enhance the conventional source-pull system
multiplier is not enough to supply the control unit writing with the RFID reader, spectrum analyzer, circulator, and atten-
information into electrically erasable programmable read-only uators. Fig. 8 shows the configuration of the enhanced source-
memory (EEPROM), except when the charge pump is charged. pull system for RFID straps. The enhanced system can measure
After both voltage multiplier and charge pump are charged, the Read/Write threshold power and impedance of RFID straps
more incident power leads to more forward current on the through responding to the modulated commands from RFID
Schottky diodes. Due to the fact that the reactance of an reader. Therefore, we can use it to verify the measurement
RFID chip is mainly determined by the junction and substrate results of the single-ended probe method.
capacitances of the Schottky diodes, the increased forward In the RFID source-pull system, RFID reader system, which
current changes the diode capacitance [15]. Therefore, the includes an RFID reader and a control laptop, sends the com-
reactance curve varies with increasing absorbed power and mand to and receives the response signal from an RFID strap
has a monotonically decreasing capacitive reactance when the with certain RF output power. Due to the fact that the RFID
voltage multiplier and charge pump are charged. Fig. 7 shows reader transmits and receives the RF signals in the same coaxial
an illustration of reactance curve varied with absorbed power cable, a circulator is used to separate the response signal of
[17]. The writing function can be done only if the charge the RFID strap and transmits it to the spectrum analyzer for

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CHEN AND LIN: CHARACTERIZATION OF RFID STRAP USING SINGLE-ENDED PROBE 3623

Fig. 9. Configuration of attenuator, circulator, triple-stub tuner, and probe.

Fig. 11. Measurement results of an RFID strap with different input power
levels using the single-ended method.

strap is measured. Similarly, by repeating the measurement

procedures above and sending out a Write-modulated command
instead of a Read one, we can measure the writing threshold
power Pwth when the RFID strap is written successfully.
The RFID source-pull system can measure practical
Read/Write threshold power and impedance of the RFID strap,
which respond to modulated commands from the RFID reader
with minimum turn-on power. However, the measurement
process cycle should be taken when the modulated command
or RF output power is changed. In other words, to perform
the RFID source-pull system requires a considerable amount
of time and effort. Again, after obtaining the threshold power
and impedance information of the RFID strap, the designers
Fig. 10. Spectrum of modulated signal from an RFID strap. can estimate the maximum Read/Write range of the designed
RFID tags before implementing prototypes.
observing the modulated signal from the RFID strap. The
minimum controllable RF output power of the RFID reader is
III. M EASUREMENT R ESULTS
15 dBm, which is much higher than the threshold power of the
RFID strap. Therefore, an attenuator is connected between the First, we demonstrate the measurement results of the single-
RFID reader and the circulator. The configuration of the triple- ended probe method with power transmission coefficient com-
stub tuner and probe is the same as that in the conventional pensation and show that the compensated results agree well
source-pull system. Fig. 9 shows the configuration of the atten- with the measurement results of using the conventional source-
uator, circulator, triple-stub tuner, and probe and an illustrated pull system. Then, to demonstrate the feasibility of using the
picture of probed strap. Take note that the probe is directly presented methods to measure the Read/Write threshold power
connected to the RFID strap and that the RFID tag antenna is and impedance of the RFID strap, the conventional source-pull
not required. system, single-ended probe, and the RFID source-pull system
The first step is the same as in the source-pull system, except all have been used. Measurement results of the RFID straps
for sending out a Read-modulated command from the RFID from two companies are presented in this section. The first
reader with a certain RF power level from low to high. Tuning RFID strap is produced by Alien Technology (Alien), while the
the triple-stub tuner until the RFID reader detects the modulated second one is produced by Texas Instruments (TI).
signal from the RFID strap or the spectrum analyzer displays
a modulated signal, as shown in Fig. 10. Second, remove the
A. Measurement Results of the Single-Ended Probe Method
RFID strap and connect the probe of network analyzer to
the source tuner output probe. Finally, the impedance Zso of For the purpose of demonstration, the raw measurement
the source tuner output port is measured, which is ideally equal results of the conventional source-pull and single-ended probe
to the complex conjugate of the RFID strap input impedance, are shown in Fig. 11. It shows the measurement results with dif-

i.e., Zstrap = Zso . Then, remove the triple-stub tuner from the ferent input power levels, and both of them are entirely different
circulator and measure the RF output power at the circulator to each other. However, we apply (4) to recalculate the mea-
output. Then, the reading threshold power Prth of the RFID surement results of the single-ended method. After applying the

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3624 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 58, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

Fig. 12. Compensation results of an RFID strap with different input power Fig. 14. Impedance curves of an Alien strap with different absorbed power
levels using the single-ended method. for the Read command.

Fig. 15. Impedance curves of an Alien strap with different absorbed power
for the Write command.

Fig. 13. Difference of Alien strap resistance with different absorbed power. impedance curves and the threshold powers and impedances
of Read commands for three different measurement methods.
power transmission coefficient compensation, the measurement The measurement results of the Read commands for the Alien
results are in good agreement with the conventional source- RFID strap agree with each other very well. Fig. 15 shows
pull system. Fig. 12 shows the compensated results of RFID the threshold powers of Write commands for three different
strap impedances related to the compensated power. In addition, measurement methods. The measurement results of the three
the compensation affects only the absorbed power values but measurement methods also agree well. The detailed measure-
not the impedances. Using the single-ended probe method, the ment data, the threshold power for Read/Write commands, and
impedance of the RFID strap with different absorbed power can the corresponding impedances are listed in Table I.
easily be measured.
C. Measurement Results of the TI RFID Strap
B. Measurement Results of the Alien RFID Strap
For TI RFID strap measurement, the difference curve of re-
For Alien RFID strap measurement, the difference curve sistance measured by a single-ended probe is shown in Fig. 16.
of resistance measured by a single-ended probe is shown in It shows that the threshold power of the Read command is about
Fig. 13. It shows that the threshold power of the Read command 9.8 dBm using the presented method. Whereas, 10.8 and
is about 14.3 dBm using the presented method. Whereas, 10.0 dBm are the threshold power of the Read command using
14.1 and 14.0 dBm are the threshold power of the Read RFID source-pull and conventional source-pull measurement
command using RFID source-pull and conventional source- methods, respectively. Fig. 17 shows the threshold powers and
pull measurement methods, respectively. Fig. 14 shows the impedances of Read commands for three different measurement

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CHEN AND LIN: CHARACTERIZATION OF RFID STRAP USING SINGLE-ENDED PROBE 3625

TABLE I
MEASUREMENT IMPEDANCE OF ALIEN STRAP SAMPLE 1 (fc = 925 MHz)

Fig. 18. Impedance curves of a TI strap with different absorbed power for the
Write command.

TABLE II
MEASUREMENT IMPEDANCE OF TI STRAP SAMPLE 1 (fc = 925 MHz)

Fig. 16. Difference of TI strap resistance with different absorbed power.

methods. The measurement results of the Read commands for
the TI RFID strap also agree with each other well. Fig. 18
shows the impedance curves and the threshold powers of
Write commands for three different measurement methods. The
measurement results of the three measurement methods also
agree with each other very well. The detailed measurement
data, the threshold power for Read/Write commands, and the
corresponding impedances are listed in Table II.

IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a single-ended probe measurement method with
power transmission coefficient compensation for the character-
ization of an RFID strap has been presented. The simplified
method can be used more easily and can be used to measure
the Read/Write threshold power and corresponding impedance
of an RFID strap without complicated operating procedures
Fig. 17. Impedance curves of a TI strap with different absorbed power for the and additional facilities. An RFID source-pull measurement
Read command. system is also constructed; the system provides more accurate

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3626 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 58, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

measurement results for different RFID-modulated commands. [11] Z. Xie, Extracting true PA input impedance for high-power RF signals,
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Sung-Lin Chen (S06) was born in Kaohsiung,
Taiwan, in 1974. He received the B.S. degree
R EFERENCES in electronic engineering from I-Shou University,
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