The meeting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology RFID Special Interest Group in MIT on 19 February was hosted by IDTechEx and entitled Printed RFID, with about 50 people attending. Only RFID offers the electronic printing industry the potential of ten trillion devices yearly, in this case replacing barcodes.
Raghu Das of IDTechEx introduced the opportunity for highest volume RFID and the challenges and PolyIC and Kovio gave an update on their two very different solutions for HF, the favorite frequency for RFID by a big margin. Klaus Ludwig of PolyIC can print HF RFID on polyester reel to reel with the transistors entirely organic but a metal antenna for now. Only a few transistors are currently possible by this low temperature process but potentially very low costs are achievable so the first products will be RFID labels addressing such problems as anti-counterfeiting and responsive labels such as novelties changing color under an RF field - useful for merchandising. A challenge is the rather high operating voltage at 10-15 volts vs about 5V for nano-silicon and 1.8v for RFID silicon chips.
Vik Pavate, Director, Business Development, of Kovio gave further detail of their breakthrough with thousands of transistors printed reel to reel on stainless steel foil, even meeting ISO 14443, the world's favorite RFID specification. They have developed nine inks to achieve this with three being organic and six inorganic, most critically the nano-silicon semiconductor having carrier mobility of 80 cm2/vs - comparable with the best inorganic compound printed semiconductors such as InGaZnO - but with potential for nano-silicon to achieve 250 cm2/vs compared with organic semiconductors being put into production at only 0.3 cm2/vs today. The Kovio product may therefore be more generally useful in electronics - at least initially - and it can even achieve UHF RFID performance. Feature size is very small for printed transistors at 20 microns with 10 microns in their sights. All three speakers talked of silicon chip RFID never getting below 5 cents and even that being some way off. The window of opportunity for silicon chip RFID in high volume applications is therefore closing fast. However, printed alternatives cannot meet the requirement for 70,000 or more transistors in EPC ISO 18000-3 Gen 2 and 18000-6 Gen 2 tags with their inappropriate overdesign for much beyond the lower volume pallet, case and air baggage uses. Kovio's market entry priorities are Consumer item level RFID tapping the larger marketing budgets by offering merchandising and other features, retail, transit and pharmaceuticals.
There was some discussion of how ISO 14443 was an example of a specification being well written and facilitating wide applications from supply chain and passports to cards and tickets, with chips having anything from a few thousand transistors to over one million depending on need. Indeed, the sister specification ISO 15693 for longer range also comes in that category. The chosen subsets of ISO 18000 EPC were considered to be of more debatable merit.
There was also a presentation by Dr Conor Madigan who is creating an MIT spinoff that has a modified ink jet process that may be useful for RFID but will be initially aimed at large screen OLED production.
For more attend Printed Electronics Europe 2008 and read Printed and Chipless RFID Forecasts, Technologies & Players.
