Scientists at 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.
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.
