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Title: Novel Low-Cost Power-Autonomous mm-Wave RFID Architectures for IoT Implementations
Committee:
Dr. Manos Tentzeris, ECE, Chair, Advisor
Dr. Andrew Peterson, ECE
Dr. Gregory Durgin, ECE
Dr. Jiang Zhu, Facebook
Dr. Joseph Constantine, AU Beirut
Abstract: The Internet of Things promises the deployment of 50 billion devices by the end of 2030. Billions of devices translates to billions of batteries in need of charging and/or replacement, at a huge cost to our environment. Likewise, implementing the concept of the Digital Twin to cities would require the deployment of trillions of wireless sensors, all of which requiring internal or external sources of energy. In addition to the need for energy, it is essential to equip these devices with ultra-low power, and high data rate and long range communication capabilities. The work presented in this thesis delivers breakthrough hardware developments, on the path leading towards the permeation of the physical into the digital. One of the most significant impacts of this work is the demonstration that, thanks to the specifications of the new 5G standards, cellular service providers will have the ability—after extending their offer from voice alone to data in the 1990s—to become power providers, enabling perpetual environmentally-friendly power autonomous sensing, tracking, and communication devices. This outcome is the product of reported advances enabling the design and demonstration of fully-printed, conformal, and smart wireless devices that can fully-autonomously communicate, at long ranges, and over a wide angular coverage. This work also proposes the first holography-infused UHF RFID-based technique for scalable, and low-cost target localization and activity monitoring. These results were achieved through 5G/mm-wave-empowered harvesters, ultra-low-power mm-wave retrodirective communications schemes, and additive manufacturing. Notably, the work describes (to our knowledge), the longest-ranging mm-wave powering, the lowest voltage and power consuming fully-passive amplified baskscatterer, as well as the longest ranging mm-wave unamplified monostatic backscatter RFIDs, at the time of their publication.
