Hi,
I guess Berenice is in her well-deserved vacation. I was chatting now with some antenna experts on this topic:
Of course everything is possible but it always depends on the effort and money you want to invest...
What will not work is that you take e.g. ST25R3916-DISCO board and connect a different antenna and it just works. One of the reasons is that it does not provide enough power to create a field large enough and sufficiently powerful and large enough to power the tags.
Roughly for an NFC antenna the diameter corresponds approximately to the achievable operating range. With ST25R3916 you can achieve a bit more range but not orders of magnitude more. Critical with your setup is also the required x and y dimension which when built with a single antenna will probably lead to tags not being read in the middle.
We don't have applications achieving such range so we cannot give you explicit recommendation and you need to experiment to see what can work and what cannot.
In general you need to consider:
- Integrating a power amplifier to be able to create enough power
- Working on a specialized antenna:
- Either integrating inner loops to see if you can address middle area with it or
- create an antenna array and use a multiplexer to drive these antennas time-multiplexed.
You can also look around to see what professional suppliers like FEIG offer, they have a selection of long range antennas and also reader modules with multiplexers.
Regards, Ulysses