Publications Whitepapers Presentations
The page contains Publications, Whitepapers, and Presentations covering or featuring the S.U.R.F.E.R. platform.
The first paper detailing the S.U.R.F.E.R. platform. This paper won "Best Paper - Honorable Mention" at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on RFID. This paper is probably the best summary overview of the S.U.R.F.E.R. platform, although the feature set and performance have improved since the publication of this paper.
Paper: A Low-Cost, High-Speed, High-Resolution Adaptively Tunable Microwave Network for an SDR UHF RFID Reflected Power Canceller.
This paper goes into a greater detail than the previous one on the transmit leakage cancellation circuit that resides on the S.U.R.F.E.R. reader. UHF RFID is a quasi full-duplex radio system in which the transmitter must be transmitting a continuous wave signal at full power while receiving a small backscatter signal from the tag. This means that a normal software-defined radio module can't be used for UHF RFID - it needs a circuit like this residing somewhere on the reader.
Poster: A Personal Software-Defined Radio (SDR) UHF RFID Reader With Subranging Tunable Microwave Network (TMN)-Based TX Cancellation
The S.U.R.F.E.R. project was also described and demonstrated live at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on RFID poster session. The poster won the "Best Poster - Expert Vote" award. This poster also alludes to the original purpose of the S.U.R.F.E.R. program, which was to be a tool to find lost objects around one's living area. Development and testing of the S.U.R.F.E.R. platform has not gotten to this application yet, but perhaps you the reader can contribute to this goal!
Invited Workshop Presentation: RF and DSP Techniques for Enabling Low-Cost Software-Defined RFID Readers
Following the presentations at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on RFID, the S.U.R.F.E.R. project was invited to present at the Monday workshop on RFID at IMS 2019. The S.U.R.F.E.R. project was again demonstrated live in front of the audience as part of a roundtable discussion. This presentation covers more detail on some of the key FPGA digital circuits than the 2018 IEEE RFID papers.
Following previous presentations, the S.U.R.F.E.R. project began to receive requests for collaborations. In order to support these efforts, a mathematical study was performed to determine how the RSSI and phase angle of the received UHF RFID tag backscatter signal should be computed. In addition, error statistics of the RSSI and phase angle estimates are computed in this whitepaper.
Prior to IMS 2019, the S.U.R.F.E.R. project was invited to write an article for IEEE Microwave Magazine in collaboration with Research Professor Gregor Lasser at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This article recaps and provides some additional information on the S.U.R.F.E.R. project previously only covered in presentations, in addition to providing some cultural context regarding our vision for the project moving forward. Furthermore, Dr. Lasser provides an excellent quantitative analysis regarding the fundamental limits of UHF RFID readers, as well as a number of antenna and transmit cancellation architectures.