Progress at Panipol

At the Conductive Polymers conference in Brussels, Jukka Perento of Panipol described the many polyaniline conductive polymer products his company offers into the Electrostatic Discharge Market ESD. This is packaging material to prevent electrostatic discharges causing damage. It may be conducting in bulk or coated with conducting layers (eg flexo). Frost and Sullivan has reported that the level of ESD damage in the US is running at $15 billion yearly - essentially damage to CMOS silicon chips. ESD also damages photographic film. Panipol even prevents discharge lamps being dangerous in mines by stopping them emitting ESD and it is working with MReal and VTT on active printed devices with several announcements concerning smart packaging promised soon.

Working with the large papermaker MReal, Panipol has developed a chipless RFID tag "HIDE" ie "hidden printed memory in packaging". The "memory element" is made by Panipol in polyaniline. This is claimed to meet EPC data requirements with 96 bits of data but only a few millimetres range and read only. It does not contain logic. Processability has been evaluated at a full scale packaging and printing converting line at Tako Carton in Tampere Finland. We are not talking labels here. We are promised printed layers " integrated into the standard packaging structure" and "manufactured with industry standard production processes".

 

MReal controls the product and the "production scale up pilot" will be this year with readiness for "customer case studies" in 2006. With Dai Nippon Printing developing electromagnetic chipless RFID and Samsung developing Surface Acoustic Wave RFID, the days of chipless RFID being an eccentricity for small businesses are over. More detail will be given when Panipol speak at the IDTechEx conference "Printed Electronics Europe" at Cambridge University UK April 19-20. See www.printelec.com .