Researchers at
Philipshave created a RFID tag based entirely on plastic electronics. According to Philips, this will be the first plastic-electronics based tag capable of transmitting multi-bit digital identification codes at 13.56MHz — the dominant industry-standard frequency for RFID tag applications.
In contrast to conventional silicon-chip-based RFID tags, a plastic electronics RFID chip can be printed directly on to a plastic substrate along with an antenna without involving complex assembly steps. Philips claimed this could pave the way for the packaging industry to replace barcodes with a low-cost RFID tag that provides individual packages with a unique item-level identification code.
Performance results for the tags were presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. 'We have shown we can make a plastic logic circuit complex enough so that an RFID tag can send out a unique identification code. Tags based on plastic electronics have so far not been able to do this,' said Philips' Steve Klink.
Plastic-electronics RFID tags have the potential to be manufactured using extremely low-cost reel-to-reel and in-line processing. Philips is involved in a project to investigate this.
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Where will all the raw materials come from for the manufacturing process? How will they be transported to the factory and what is going to be done with the various scrap and residues?