How to evaluate the NFC PCB designed by me?

[DIvan.1]

HI everyone!

Recently I designed my own PCB, upload the program and successfully started to read/write the tag.

Now I want to evaluate my board (how good the signals and antenna are, amplitude, phase, amplification, etc.)

Can you suggest me any possibility to get as much us possible information about "How good my PCB" is?

Someone of you also mentioned that It's possible to measure CSO/CSI pin with oscilloscope

I will be happy any of your information,

Domen Ivanc

[Ulysses HERNIOSUS · Accepted solution]

Hi Domen,

you are asking a simple but nevertheless difficult question - we cannot really 100% answer as it depends a lot on your expectations. A simple expectation could be to have a desired minimal read range with your antenna. If it does not fit you can start to investigate details of the system:

• Investigate the antenna matching and the resulting smith chart (please refer to the Antenna matching guide for details)
• Investigate the capacitive voltage divider at the RFIs
• Investigate on the noise floor which you could observe on CSI/CSO using proper modes
• Investigate wave shapes - are you targeting any conformance?
• Investigate the EMC conformance
• ......

Regards, Ulysses

[DIvan.1]

Thank you for the informations you gave me.

I was looking on a Datasheets and I saw amplitude/phase registers. Is there any chance to get useful informations about amplitude and phase (maybe your demo SW include this kind of function?) ?

I'm using ISO-15693 tags technology.

Best,

Domen

[Ulysses HERNIOSUS]

Hi Domen,

you can use the amplitude measurement to see if your capacitive voltage divider has the right ratio. Hard to tell optimal values of the phase, it depends on your matching. Typically we target something around 90deg.

Regards, Ulysses