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NEWS

RFID breakthroughs: Philips' all-plastic circuit, Hitachi's ultra-thin micro-tag

"Philips Creates Plastic RFID Tags" from Electronic News, 6 February:

"Scientists at Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Philips Research have created a 13.56MHz RFID tag based entirely on plastic electronics that will be a less expensive alternative to conventional silicon RFID applications.

"A plastic electronics RFID chip, as opposed to silicon-chip-based RFID tags, can be printed directly onto a plastic substrate along with an antenna without involving complex assembly steps. This could pave the way for the packaging industry to replace existing barcodes with a low-cost RFID tag that provides individual packages with a unique item-level identification code - something not feasible with current barcode technology, said Philips Research.

" 'The realization of plastic RFID tags that operate at 13.56MHz is a precursor for wide-scale market acceptance in the coming years,' Leo Warmerdam, senior director at Philips Research, said in a statement. 'To speed up commercialization of our technology we will explore co-development options with third parties.'

"Philips Research's plastic-electronics-based tag, which is as thin as paper and no larger than a postage stamp, is capable of transmitting multi-bit digital identification codes at 13.56MHz, the dominant industry-standard radio frequency for RFID tag applications. As an additional demonstrator for the technology, scientists at Philips Research have also developed a 64-bit code generator, showing the practicality of building plastic electronic circuits with the complexity required for item-level tagging.

"Performance results for these circuits will be presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference this week.

"Philips has been partnering with HP since last September to adopt a global RFID standard to allow global readability of RFID tags."

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"RFID chip slims down to 7.5 µm" by Janine Love, eeProductCenter, 6 February:

"Hitachi, Ltd. announced it has developed and verified operation of a 0.15 x 0.15 millimeter (mm), 7.5-µm thick contactless IC. The company reports that this is the smallest and thinnest in the world, to date.

"The chip is a smaller version of Hitachi's 0.4 x 0.4 mm chip, but maintains the same level of functionality, which includes 2.4-GHz operation, 128-b memory capacity, and a 12.5 kbits/s data transfer rate. The distance between each circuit element was reduced by using SOI technology.

"[The] chip will be demonstrated at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2006), being held from 5th - 9th February 2006, in San Francisco, CA. Click here for the data sheet."

[The little black squares in the picture above are samples of the "mu chip." They are significantly thinner than paper. The silicon blocks near them are the earlier 0.4 mm chip mentioned in the article.]

[RFID: 7 February 2006]