Prof. Eng-Hock Lim

Center for Communication Systems and Networks, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia

Date: 3:00pm to 4:00pm, 14 AUG 2020

Venue: Webinar

Abstract: The rapid advancement of RFID technology has attracted much attention in recent years. Among the advantages it can provide are – (a) It does not require line-of-sight communication; (b) It can be read from a long read distance; (c) It has high data transfer rate and it is able to store a lot of data; (d) It can provide real-time updates which can improve the visibility of inventories. Thanks to these salient features and they have made the RFID technology become increasingly popular. It is widely implemented for assets tracking, inventory checking, supply chain, gate automation, and etc. However, the main challenge for RFID is that the tag antenna has to be specifically designed for a certain application, especially when it is to be placed on metal. This is because the tag performances can degrade significantly when it is placed on a metallic object. In the past decades, many types of UHF tag antennas have been proposed for mitigating the effects of the backing metals.  In this sharing session, the recent technical developments and design tradeoffs of the metal-mountable UHF tag antennas will be discussed. A couple of design techniques will be introduced for further miniaturizing various electrically small tag antennas for on-metal applications. I will also share the research activities of my group at UTAR.

About the speaker: Eng-Hock Lim was born in Selangor, Malaysia. He received his B. Sc. (Electrical Engineering) from National Taiwan Ocean University, M. Eng. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) from Nanyang Technological University, and Ph.D. (Electronic Engineering) from City University of Hong Kong. He served as the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions of Antennas and Propagation from 2013 to 2016. Currently, he is a Professor at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, where he is serving as the Chairperson of the Center for Communication Systems and Networks. He is the founding chair of the IEEE Council on RFID, Malaysia Chapter, and the IEEE Malaysia Distinguished Lecturer for 2019-2020. His current research interests include RFID antennas, reflectarrays/transmitarrays, and multifunctional antennas.