Title: The Evolution of RFID Technology: A Historical Overview
Abstract: RAIN RFID is a technology based on passive modulated backscatter that allows one to identify, authenticate and locate wirelessly powered tags. Its applications range from inventory / supply chain management and asset tracking to healthcare and retail. This talk covers the history of RFID and evolution of RFID tags and systems, from its early days to the present state of RAIN RFID, including its capabilities, applications, and ongoing developments.
Pavel Nikitin received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He is currently a Technical Fellow with Impinj where he is doing research, design, and development of RAIN RFID tags and systems products. He previously worked at Honeywell, Intermec, IBM, and Ansys. He is an IEEE Fellow, NAI Senior Member, received four Best Paper awards, has over 80 US and international patents and over 70 IEEE publications.
Title: RFID technology in industrial applications, wireless connections for biological and healthcare applications, and 5-6G human exposure assessment
Abstract: RFID technology and wireless connectivity in industrial, biological and healthcare applications are interesting domains for the RFID-TA audience. In this presentation, different topics will be tackled: -RFID relative localization for drone-based inventory management in industrial facilities towards ubiquitous wireless indoor positioning, wireless power transfer for in-body sensors, and localization for wireless capsule endoscopy. Last topics fit in the domain of electromagnetic modeling for minimally invasive medical devices.
All wireless applications have to satisfy human electromagnetic exposure guidelines of ICNIRP and IEEE. In the presentation, numerical exposure assessment for future 5G-6G applications in industry will be discussed.
Wout Joseph (Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8807-0673) was born in Ostend, Belgium on October 21, 1977. He received the M. Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Ghent University (Belgium), in July 2000. From September 2000 to March 2005 he was a research assistant at the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) of the same university. During this period, his scientific work was focused on electromagnetic exposure assessment. His research work dealt with measuring and modelling of electromagnetic fields around base stations for mobile communications related to the health effects of the exposure to electromagnetic radiation. This work led to a Ph. D. degree in March 2005. From April 2005-2009, he was postdoctoral researcher for iMinds-UGent/INTEC. From October 2007 to October 2013, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the FWO-V (Research Foundation – Flanders). Since October 2009, he is professor in the domain of Experimental Characterization of wireless communication systems. He is IMEC PI since 2017. He was elected council board lid of EBEA (European Bioelectromagnetics Association) in 2015-2018,and re-elected board member at large in 2019. In 2022, he was elected board member of the new Bioelectromagnetics society and since 2024 he is re-elected as board member of the Bioelectromagnetics society .
His professional interests are electromagnetic field exposure assessment, in-body electromagnetic field modelling, electromagnetic medical applications, propagation for wireless communication systems, IoT, antennas and calibration. Furthermore, he specializes in wireless performance analysis and Quality of Experience.
His research is ranked first in number of dosimetric peer-reviewed studies for the radiofrequency range, and ranked second for studies covering the entire frequency range (Bodewein et al. BioEM 2016 www.emf-portal.org).
Title: Backscatter Communication: Today RFID, Tomorrow Everywhere!
Last year, over 50 billion UHF RFID chips were manufactured, and industry estimates suggest that the number of UHF RFID chips produced will exceed 100 billion per year by 2028. Every one of these billions of RFID chips includes memory, digital logic, RF energy harvesting, and backscatter communication, making backscatter one of the most prevalent forms of wireless communication in existence today. However, backscatter communication still is not well understood, or widely used, outside of the RFID community.
This talk will present some challenges and opportunities for integrating backscatter with mainstream communication standards, protocols, and networks, such as the standards-based Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular (5G/6G) networks that our smart phones, tablets, and other wireless devices rely on. I will focus on the physical layer aspects of generating backscatter signals that are compatible with these standards, and touch on current efforts within the IEEE and other standards organizations that will soon integrate backscatter alongside today’s active transmitters. I will point out some key differences between backscatter and active transmitters and suggest some research directions that could help bridge the gaps between backscatter and active communication links.
Matt Reynolds is an academic and entrepreneur who has been involved in the development of the IoT for nearly 25 years, since the early days of the MIT Auto-ID Center in 1999. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. He was previously the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He is also co-founder of the pioneering RFID systems firm ThingMagic Inc (acquired by Trimble Navigation), the energy conservation firm Zensi (acquired by Belkin), and the home sensing company SNUPI Inc (acquired by Sears). He is currently co-founder of the millimeter wave imaging firm ThruWave Inc.
Matt’s research interests include microwave and millimeter wave imaging, energy efficiency at the physical layer of wireless communication, and the physics of sensing and actuation. Matt received the Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2003, where he was a Motorola Fellow, as well as S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, has received five Best Paper awards at IEEE and ACM conferences, and has 87 issued US patents, with nearly 100 patent applications pending. He is a UW CoMotion Presidential Innovation Faculty Fellow.
Title: Towards Sustainable IoT: Unified SWIPT, Backscattering, and Hybrid Energy Harvesting for Battery-Less Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract: The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) presents a significant challenge for powering billions of sensor nodes. This keynote discusses an innovative approach to energy-autonomous wireless sensing that leverages the integration of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT), backscatter communication, and hybrid energy harvesting methodologies. Utilizing recent advancements in multitone waveform design, frequency-division duplexing (FDD), and rectifier-aware modulation, it will be illustrated how unified and passive receiver architectures facilitate bidirectional communication while simultaneously harvesting energy from both RF and ambient light sources. Recent key innovations will be presented, such as Biased-FSK modulation for efficiency-aware SWIPT, dual-band backscatter systems enabling simultaneous uplink and downlink, and the integration of hybrid photovoltaic RF rectifiers to ensure continuous power availability. Experimental results demonstrate that these systems achieve robust communication and energy self-sufficiency. The keynote further explores the theoretical foundations, circuit-level co-design strategies, and implications for sustainable RFID- and WPT-enabled IoT infrastructures. This presentation seeks to inspire a paradigm shift in the design philosophy of RFID and wireless sensors, transitioning from energy-consuming to energy-aware systems and from discrete functions to unified architectures, thereby paving the way for maintenance-free sensing platforms.
Dominique Schreurs (Fellow, IEEE) received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she was a Visiting Scientist with Agilent Technologies, ETH Zürich, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She is currently a Full Professor with KU Leuven. Her research interests include microwave/mmWave metrology, device and circuit modeling, and subsystem design for wireless and biomedical applications. Since 2009, she has been on IEEE MTT-S AdCom in multiple roles. She was a Distinguished Microwave Lecturer (2012-2014) and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on microwave theory and techniques (2014-2016). From 2018 to 2019, she was the President of the Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S). She was also the Co-Chair of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the International Microwave Symposium 2023 and the General Chair of IMBioC 2023. She was involved in multiple ARFTG conferences as Conference Chair or TPC Chair. She is also a past President of the ARFTG organization.