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March 7th, 2011
Graduate Seminar
"Small, Dual Band, Placement Insensitive RFID Antennas"
with
Dr. Jessica Ruyle
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
When: Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 3:05 p.m.
Where: Warnock L105
ABSTRACT
RFID systems with "peel-and-stick" labels are currently limited to tracking items with nearly electromagnetically transparent material properties. This limitation stems from the antenna choice for these labels - a dipole variant. The slot antenna, the effective inverse of the dipole, is shown to be an effective RFID antenna for environment-independent peel-and-stick applications. A miniaturization and multi-band design technique is shown for a placement insensitive RFID antenna. With the significant advance in functionality over existing RFID antennas that is demonstrated, the purview of peel-and-stick RFID systems can expand to track all object types (metal, liquid, etc.) - overcoming a fundamental limitation in current RFID deployments.
The main focus of this research lies in the formulation of design models describing the behavior of the antenna's components. These design models, developed for the work in mitigating the effects of the environment on RFID antennas, can be extended to address challenges in multi-band antennas for mobile devices and conformal UWB antennas for pulsed communication systems or Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Design models of antennas, which offer a fundamental understanding of how the antenna functions, become critical as communication systems move toward increasingly challenging design spaces such as the extreme form factor constraints of mobile devices or the multi-frequency operation requirements of cognitive radio. With an antenna design model, the antenna's effect on the total system, the system's effect on the antenna, and even the effect of the environment in which the system is placed can be well-estimated or even exploited if designed well. My approach to antenna design and characterization supports a strategic position for these devices as vital components within interdisciplinary research and systems.
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Jessica Ruyle graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2006. While at Texas A&M University Jessica completed three internships with Sandia National Laboratories and was President of HKN. Jessica moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for graduate school. She completed an M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. Jessica's graduate research has resulted in two patent filings. The first patent, the culmination of her Master’s research, was for a pattern reconfigurable microstrip antenna. The second patent resulted from her doctoral research and was for a placement insensitive RFID antenna.