Fabrication and Performance Evaluation of Carbon-based Stretchable RFID Tags on Textile Substrates

We fabricate carbon-based stretchable antennas for passive UHF RFID tags. The tag antennas are created on a stretchable elastic band by brush-painting. In addition to wireless evaluation of the fabricated RFID tags before and after cyclic stretching, the properties of the novel carbon-based antenna material are studied. The wireless performance of the established RFID tags is compared to similar stretchable silver-based RFID tags. Based on the achieved results, the established carbon-based tag antennas do not perform in the same high level as the silver-based tag antennas but their read ranges of around 2 to 2.4 meters are suitable for versatile textile-integrated RFID applications. Stretching causes permanent decrease to the tag read range but they remain functional even after 100 stretching cycles. These preliminary results are very promising, considering the current trend towards more environmentally friendly and cost-effective materials in electronics.