Design of a Wide Planar Waveguide Antenna for UHF Near-Field RFID Reader With High Reading Rate

UHF near-field RFID reader antenna based on leaky waveguide is proposed and the performance is evaluated using numerical simulation and experiment. In order to suppress the standing wave along transverse direction, a pair of notches is placed on the transverse edge of the mesh layer of the planar waveguide. Diversity operation by switching impedance of the end terminal of the planar waveguide antenna is also introduced to suppress the standing wave effect along longitudinal direction. Numerical simulation and experiment show that the near-field null lines parallel to the longitudinal direction is almost removed by the presence of the notches and the distribution of the field strength becomes almost uniform because of the utilization of the switching diversity. It is demonstrated that the reading performance of the commercial RFID tags is greatly improved by using the proposed RFID reader antenna with the diversity operation of termination impedance.