October 01, 2005
Cheap RFID tags
For RFID, printed conductive patterns technology is an attractive alternative for the cheap manufacture of tag antennas. The demand for tags is growing, by April 2005; Texas Instruments had approached a sales figure of 500 million tags. Symbol Technologies will fulfill the tag requirements of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas and the Hong Kong International Airport. The RFID industry can also expect orders for several billion tags once the EPC standards are uniformly applied.
Thin Film Transistor Circuits (TFTCs) and Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) tags appear to be an inexpensive alternative to silicon chips. Chipless tags that do not require an antenna may never really gain mass popularity because of their failure to meet the mandates set by retailers and the military. Thus, if barcodes, which are required in trillions of units per year, have to be replaced by RFID tags, there is a requirement for at least that many antennas. Tags that work at a frequency of 13.56 MHz require accurately crafted antennas with the coils having exact dimensions; tags that work in the UHF bands can use antennas with less stringent dimensional and conductivity requirements. To meet the demands for trillions of tags at an acceptable cost to the customer, the tag has to sell at one cent or less. This is possible only if the antenna is printed.
High-speed printing processes that use fine silver formulations include offset litho, gravure, etc. Also, there is stiff competition to come up with an ink that does not contain silver but can still deposit at high speed to form a substrate with the required level of conductance. Several printers are putting their faith in wet processes like electroless deposition to produce conducting substrates at high speeds.
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