RFID

Speaking in Frankfurt this week, Division Manager Karsten Ries of Mekoprint Graphic Electronics said that his company has been printing mobile phone antennas, mobile phone speaker membranes, antennas in side view mirrors of cars and RFID antennas for many years.

Dr Peter Harrop, IDTechEx meets a few of the people working on printed electronics and allied matters at the historic University of Hong Kong.

Printed RFID tags have been one of the most important drivers of the new electronics.

Researchers performed tests on printed radio chips, produced from polymer circuits on thin, flexible polyester foil, for the first time in electronic ticketing and security.

Holst Centre - founded by the Belgian nanoelectronics research center IMEC and the Dutch research center TNO presented a 128 bit organic RFID transponder chip with Manchester encoding and anti-collision protocol.

This one day meeting organised by the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Institute of Nanotechnology started with Professor Sir Richard Friend explaining the theory behind printed polymeric transistors, OLEDs and photovoltaics.

UPM Raflatac and Blue Spark Technologies partner to drive new battery assisted passive RFID research and product development

PolyIC presented the prototype of an air stable passive organic CMOS 4-bit RFID transponder for a carrier frequency of 13.56MHz.

The Muehlbauer Technology Group provides with the FCM 20000 the most efficient and highly flexible system for high volume RFID Smart Label strap production.

Mühlbauer has been selected to supply all necessary equipment for RFID inlay production, label converting and label insertion to exax Inc.

Muehlbauer Technology Group, an international and independent consultant and manufacturer of innovative solutions for the Semiconductor related products market, announces the market launch of its new high speed RFID inlay production system TAL 15000.

Mühlbauer Technology Group has launched the world's fastest and highly flexible RFID inlay production line TAL 20000.

PowerID Ltd., the industry leader in battery-assisted, passive (BAP) RFID technology, announced the availability of smaller, improved versions of its EPCglobal Class 1, Generation 2-compliant PowerG and PowerM BAP labels.

Dr Peter Harrop of IDTechEx gave a video interview and animations, concerning the future use of printed electronics in supermarkets.

Active RFID (where the tag has its own power supply) often has printed sensors and sometimes printed antennas. Unisys serves as the prime contractor and systems integrator for the RFID III DoD contract, bringing together the technologies of Hi-G-Tek and other solution providers.

OrganicID™ has successfully printed a simplified CMOS RFID device that includes much of the critical circuitry needed for an EPC-compatible device.

SOMARK Innovations, Inc. raised a round of venture capital financing, led by Finistere Ventures and T2 Venture Capital.

Printed RFID tags that could be cheap enough to use on consumable packaging to monitor temperature, store and transmit data may only be a year way claim scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute of Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB in Erlangen.

A Swedish research centre has been established for intelligent pharmaceutical packaging, smart foods packaging, hospital logistics and patient care.

The world's first plastic diode operating in the Ultra-high frequency (UHF) band has been developed by IMEC (Belgium) and TNO (The Netherlands).

A neat "robot" terminal has just been announced by electronics giant NEC. It combines a touch-sensitive screen in its chest with an RFID reader terminal for gathering data from the e-money phones that are popular in Japan.

Kovio Inc., a privately held Silicon Valley company, announced this week the development of the world's first silicon ink based RFID and launch of its printed silicon RFID platform for item-level intelligence.

A unique combination of wireless technologies will allow the next generation of cell phones, PDAs, or wireless laptops to be used as readers for virtually any sensor application, ranging from glucose testing with a cell phone to remote temperature checking of an appliance in a secondary home, using a laptop.

At Europe's largest RFID conference, RFID Europe, in Cambridge UK 30th September - 1 October, the most impressive users, developers and suppliers of ruggedised and apparel RFID will present their new advances and view of the future.

While most investment in printed electronics has been by material companies, KURZ is one of the few printing companies that has invested significantly in the subject, bringing much needed printing expertise to the industry.

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London are helping to perfect a technique used to catch serial killers, by testing it on bumblebees.

IDTechEx report on the SEMICON West event held in San Francisco in mid July - an event with over one thousand exhibitors covering the silicon supply chain.

Printed RFID is only part of an emerging $300 billion business in printing many forms of electronics and electrics.

Acquisition expands Impinj product portfolio and increases customer base

New antenna advances will be covered at RFID Europe later this year - presentations include Leonhard Kurz of Germany developers of printed RFID and other futuristic capabilities. You can also visit Conductive Inkjet Technology which has new antenna technology and Marshall Aerospace.

European researchers have taken a major step towards the goal of developing printable electronics that can be used for creating radio frequency identification tags and flexible watch displays.

Printed electronics is used in RFID to a steadily increasing extent as volumes start to exceed those met in any other form of electronics.

Currently, counterfeiting and the illegal distribution of many brand goods and other products continues throughout the world but now many countries and industries have introduced countermeasures using cutting-edge technologies.

Taking medication wrongly is a huge problem, resulting in more than 150,000 people dying unnecessarily in both North America and in Europe every year.

The big penetration of transport ticketing by the more reliable, faster and less easily defrauded RFID will only happen when it is entirely printed and costing under 5 cents per disposable ticket.

Printed electronics is evolving so fast that the full variety of benefits arising has yet to become clear.

3M uses balls with self levelling RFID tags in them for location and identity of gas and other pipelines in the USA - a similar function is now being performed in China.

MacDermid Electronics Solutions has developed a novel additive circuit formation process called MicroCat.

Soligie Appoints Printed Electronics Veterans Richard Morris & Mark Duarte to Lead Business Development & Sales.

One day there may be laws to tag all 150 million dogs in China and 2.4 billion pigs yearly but IDTechEx finds that there is no hurry to do this and when it is done it will almost certainly be on a province by province basis.

The Chinese are anxious to leapfrog the foreign competition in RFID and they are trialling the U-Code alternative to EPC as something lower cost, simpler and more likely to have printed logic, not just antennas.

These very affordable hand held devices and tiny tags permit items, people and animals to be located in 3D and, where necessary, electronically ring fenced.

It sounds like science fiction but smart paint may be available in the near future.

China was the world's largest RFID market in 2007 on the back of the huge city card schemes and the $6 billion national ID card scheme, all now largely completed.

Further to our article of yesterday regarding news of printed RFID at Smart Labels USA in Boston February 20-21, this event also included Vubiq, Nano eprint and PolyIC.

By popular request, printed RFID received much more prominence at this year's RFID Smart Labels USA in Boston February 20-21.

Only RFID offers the electronic printing industry the potential of ten trillion devices yearly, in this case replacing barcodes.

At the Aichi World Fair in Japan in 2005, Hitachi Mew Solutions 2.45 GHz passive RFID inserts were in 25 million admission tickets that were issued.