Printed Electronics - The RFID Tag of the Future

Filed in archive Tags and Readers , Ubiquitous Computing on March 8, 2006

RFID has a bright and "printed" future.

That may sound counterintuitive in this day of wireless communications and the Internet, where newspapers and magazines lose ground by the month. But according to a recent article by British analyst firm IDTechEx, the idea of a printed future makes a lot of sense in the context of RFID. And we are well on the path toward it.

IDTechEx points out how the silicon chip-based RFID tag is limiting. The price of silicon chips for RFID tags may be inexpensive enough for some uses, but it is keeping prices too high for wider adoption on a far broader scale. What's more, the physical properties of silicon-based chips keep finished products unnecessarily large -- too large for what's called "smart packaging" -- and prone to failures.

Enter the printing industry. If, like me, you were thinking of a fuddy-duddy industry where little of significance has happened since the 15th Century when Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, then you need to get up to speed on current events.

Science has married printing, and the offspring are all sorts of new forms of papers, displays, chipless circuits and chipless RFID. Some of it is reminiscent of science fiction, such as the kind of displays seen in the film Minority Report.

Read "Printing the Electronic Future" by IDTechEx. It took me a little while to digest the significance of this article and consider the possibilities. But when I did, I realized it portays exciting developments in RFID that are not that far away. Some are already happening.

Photo credit: Thin Film Electronics