Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Open Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Jin W. Choi

Committee Member 1

Anthony J. Pinar

Committee Member 2

Flavio Bezerra Costa

Abstract

This thesis presents the design, construction, and testing of a batteryless Near-field communication (NFC) powered wireless sensor node intended for maintenance free, short range Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The work focuses on harvesting energy from a 13.56 MHz NFC field to power a very low-power sensing platform capa- ble of measuring temperature, pressure, and humidity without the use of batteries or wired power. The motivation behind this approach is the growing need for reliable, sustainable, and low-maintenance sensing systems that can operate in environments where battery replacement is impractical, undesirable, or environmentally costly. The prototype is built around a single integrated NFC chip that combines the NFC interface, on-chip memory, and an embedded low power processor. This sin- gle chip solution integrates the NFC front end, a tuned loop antenna for energy harvesting, multiple sensor connection options, and a control program designed for operation from intermittently available harvested energy. The completed prototype performs on demand data acquisition, stores measure- ments in on chip non volatile memory, and communicates results through a standards compliant NFC link while powered entirely by the reader’s Radio Frequency(RF) field. Key engineering contributions include practical antenna tuning for improved harvested voltage, power-aware sensor integration strategies, and development of a simple control flow that keeps active time short enough to remain within the available energy budget. Experimental evaluation confirms that the implemented NFC powered design can reliably acquire sensor data and communicate with an NFC reader within practical near-field distances. The results demonstrate achievable trade offs between energy availability, sensing delay, memory usage, and communication stability, and show that batteryless NFC sensing is a realistic option for compact, low-maintenance IoT devices.

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