Combined system analysis and automated design of RFID transponder systems

RFID transponder systems including ID and sensor functionality conquer more and more new application areas. Especially passive transponders with integrated sensors represent miniaturized and autonomous functionalities. That can be used in industry for process monitoring or automation. Just as well complex and implantable diagnostic systems are available in e.g. medical engineering using that technology. Considering these manifold usage scenarios and considering different specifications on performance and capabilities a customized configuration of the transponder system is necessary. In this connection often used approximated or closed formulas for system design do not meet the requirements of accuracy for most cases. Furthermore, searching for an optimized system solution is often impossible. On the other hand numerical tools using e.g. FEM are well known. But automated system optimization can only be done partly and with big efforts. Considering that, this paper focuses on methods for a combined system analysis and an automated design of RFID transponder systems to open up that bottleneck. The most important goal of the presented methods is a high efficiency and a sufficient accuracy. That is necessary to consider field models and electrical circuit models concurrently and to find an optimal solution within an adequate amount of time. The methods are brought together in a new software tool called TransCal. It could be an interesting approach to design the transmission channel, to optimize the antennas and to integrate it into the whole system.