Holst Centre Netherlands - breakthrough in organic RFID

The relatively new Holst Centre in the Netherlands, founded by the Belgian nanoelectronics research center IMEC and the Dutch research centre TNO, has announced a polymeric 64-bit inductively-coupled passive RFID tag operating at 13.56MHz "HF". With a record 780bit/s data readout of 64 bits over 10cm, the device may meet some item-level tagging requirements. For example, to keep costs below those of EPC labels, Marks and Spencer in the UK uses a 64 bit read only chip from EM Microelectronics in Switzerland, one of the top three RFID chip makers in the world. M&S will soon be buying 350 million yearly as global leader in item level tagging in the retail environment. We also note that a typical windshield tag for non stop road tolling is 24 bit read only, though overall, in the RFID business, read only is the minority of expenditure and projects. Nevertheless, tagging in hundreds of billions yearly within ten years as predicted by IDTechEx, ABI Research and Frost & Sullivan can only occur if tag costs tumble to one cent or so - something the silicon chip will never achieve. Even with printed transistors, it is probable that this target will only be achieved if simple read only designs with 64 bits of data - or not much more - are accepted, as envisaged by the U-Code competitor for EPCglobal which has trials in seven countries of East Asia.

The Holst tag is claimed to provide a 5-fold higher bit rate compared to other state-of-the-art plastic RFID systems. Others making printed organic transistors in their laboratories have usually only been able to announce memory of a few bits of data, albeit on low cost flexible substrates reel to reel in some cases. The new device has a capacitor, plastic rectifier and plastic circuit, all on foil. Its LC antenna resonates at 13.56MHz, powering an organic rectifier, which generates the DC supply voltage for the 64-bit organic transponder chip which drives the modulation transistor on/ off state with a 64bit code sequence. The foil with the transponder chip is processed with the state-of-the-art organic electronics technology provided by Holst Centre partner Polymer Vision which recently bought the Innos manufacturing facility of Southampton University in the UK to make flexible electrophoretic displays with pentacene transistor drive circuits. While being a slower process, this does at least give better transistors, which is important given the greatly superior electronic properties of inorganic compounds (eg Toppan Printing/Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hewlett Packard/ Oregon State University, Cambridge University CAPE/T3 Technologies and work in Portugal) and nano-silicon in printed transistors (Kovio).

Vertical geometry is used for the Holst organic diodes, as favored by ORFID in the USA for printed organic transistors. They are used in the rectifier since Holst claim they outperform organic transistors for rectification at frequencies at and above HF. At an RF magnetic field strength of 1.26A/m the rectifier generates an internal transponder supply voltage of 14 volts, when the 64-bit designed code is read out at 787bits/s. The reading distance is up to 10cm, typical for ISO 14443.

This organic 64bit circuit, from Polymer Vision, uses organic bottom-gate p-type pentacene thin film transistors from a soluble precursor route so it does not yet have the power saving and performance of a CMOS circuit. Innos had been using the traditional vacuum route with peel from silicon and deposit onto a flexible substrate as an extra stage. The new device comprises only 400 transistors vs "several thousand" for the printed nano-silicon RFID labels recently announced from the Kovio laboratory in the USA, so it is unlikely to meet ISO 14443, unlike the Kovio product, but clearly that could be a target for the future.

By contrast, all of the 360 or so developers of printed transistors - half of them academic - are a million miles from the 70,000+ transistors of the overdesigned new EPC ISO 18000-3 Gen 2 specification with its many "nice if" features and backwards compatibility with the complex command infrastructure used with ISO 18000-6 Gen 2 UHF labels favored by Wal-Mart and the US Army. Kovio promises one tenth of the cost of the equivalent ISO 14443 chip within two years or so and the new product from the Holst Centre/ Polymer Vision is also capable of sharp cost reduction on the conventional silicon chip in basic RFID. The significance of this is huge. Over 50% of all money spent on RFID is directed at HF systems with the expenditure on cards/ tickets/ supply chain etc to the HF specification ISO 14443 alone being over ten times the expenditure on RFID to any other specification.

At the largest conference on Printed Electronics in the world - Printed Electronics Europe in Dresden April 8-9 - the Holst Centre, Sony. Palo Alto Research Center, Oregon State University, LGPhilipsLCD, Philips, University of Minnesota, University of Cambridge, Cubic Transportation Systems, Polymer Vision, Plastic Logic and other giants of the industry will report latest transistor progress and imminent applications, including tickets, displays and RFID. The road map to printing electronics directly onto things - like 85% of barcodes today - will become clearer. Try that with silicon chips. The modern printed transistor can have organic, inorganic compound or nano-silicon semiconductors. All have advantages and disadvantages and there may be a place for all of them given the huge variety of needs from high power to light emitting and ultra low cost transistors - even transistors on paper. All are covered in this conference - the full picture. For more information see www.IDTechEx.com/peEurope.

 

 

You can hear Kovio present at the IDTechEx RFID Smart Labels USA event Feb 20-21 www.IDTechEx.com/USA.