A surface acoustic wave based passive temperature sensor capable of multiple access is investigated. Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) codes of eight chips were implemented using a reflective delay line scheme on a Y-Z LiNbO₃ piezoelectric substrate. An accurate simulation based on the combined finite- and boundary element method (FEM/BEM) was performed in order to determine the optimum design parameters. The scaling factor 's' and time delay factor 'τ' were extracted using signal processing techniques based on the wavelet transform of the correlation function, and then evaluated at various ambient temperatures. The scaling factor 's' gave a more stable and reliable response to temperature than the time delay factor 'τ'. Preliminary results show that the sensor response is fast and consistent subject to ambient temperature and it exhibits good linearity of 0.9992 with temperature varying from 0 to 130 °C.
Keywords: passive; radio frequency identification (RFID); surface acoustic wave (SAW) device; temperature sensor.