Here we look at a few of the people working on printed electronics and allied matters at the historic University of Hong Kong. We visited Victor P Zhao and colleagues Wilson WS Tang, Adam Fong, Kelly MK Lam and Anthony Kwok. They are involved in RFID development and commercialisation including improvements to UHF EPC RFID labels with copper and printed silver antennas for item level tagging of such UHF-hostile things as soft drinks and all forms of product, including food, in supply chains. Both near and far field UHF is being trialled.
The work includes case, pallet load and intermodal container level. China alternates with the USA in being the largest RFID market in the world but whereas the largest RFID orders in the USA are military, road tolling and passports in recent times, in China the dominant uses have been national and local contactless ID cards, libraries and increasingly logistics. The Chinese government has recently required that RFID trials should involve at least 200,000 tags, apparently with the objective of growing the industry.
Printed RFID
Printing antennas for all HF and UHF labels, cards and tickets is one focus of Chinese research and industry. Increasingly it is achieved directly onto paper without the intermediate stage of a plastic inlay. We visited the magnificently located Hong Kong University of Science and Technology HKUST in the New Territories where there is much relevant work. This includes work such as a lower cost EPC UHF RFID chip using standard CMOS processes, as we await printed ISO 18000-6 EPC transistor circuits, which are a long way off due to their unnecessary complexity and a UHF reader using a reduced data set to save cost. Donghuan library in China has bucked standard HF for library books and other assets and used UHF with printed silver antennas, presumably for lower tag cost and longer range. Shelves have readers so lights light up if a book is put back in the wrong place. Designer brand Ralph Lauren is trialling a woven RFID tag by Hyan Label of China for anti-counterfeiting that costs ten cents and has a printed antenna.
Printed optoelectronics, nanosensors and OLEDs
We learned that Assistant Professor Wallace CH Choy, in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Hong Kong University, specialises in organic semiconductor optoelectronics, nano-optoelectronics, nano-biosensors, and integrated photonic devices. In an example of mixed chemistry, with colleagues, he has recently written on "Hybrid Nanoparticle/Organic Devices with Strong Resonant Tunneling Behaviors." Other recent work includes "Tunable Full-Color Emission of Two-unit Stacked Organic Light Emitting Diodes with Dual-metal Intermediate Electrode," and "Nanoparticle-induced Resonant Tunneling Behaviors in Small Molecule Organic Light Emitting Devices."
