Application of Additive Manufacturing Based Thermal Printing Techniques for Realization of Electronically Rewritable Chipless RFID Tags on Flexible Substrates

In this article, we present the design and realization of an electronically rewritable RF encoding particle (REP) for chipless RFID applications. This (REP) resonator geometry is integrated with two conductive bridging random access memory (CBRAM) based non-volatile RF switches, and could be electronically programmed using DC pulses to any of possible four resonant states to represent two bits of information. Emerging additive manufacturing (AM) technique based thermal transfer printing is utilized for the realization of this resonator on flexible and low cost Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. At present the size of the REP is such that five such REPs could be arranged on a standard credit card size tag. Also this REP encodes the most number of bits reported among non-volatile electronically rewritable REPs for chipless RFID applications - 2 bits, till date.