March 06, 2007
Company Drops RFID Patents
With all the companies levying lawsuits about patent infringement, you'd think that Australia's Sandtracker would at least sell their patents or give them to the RFID Consortium patent pool. Instead, they've decided to abandon them [Stuff NZ]. According to the Stuff New Zealand article, Sandtracker had original thought they could crack the 7-cent barried for RFID chips. So they created their RFID tags with their chips, which use quartz crystal diodes instead of the typical silicon.
Problem is, regular RFID readers cannot be used with these tags. They apparently wanted to redesign their reader and transponder, but decided to abandon the patents. Meanwhile, an Israeli company, SmartCode, has cracked the 5-cent silicon-based tag level. And there's printable RFID tags, which Philips is working on, which if successful will result in sub one-cent tags. However, some people have said that they feel printable tags are a ways off yet.
Still, RFID chips are bound to go down under normal economic influences, as production volumes increase. The catch-22, of course, is that chips (and thus tags) are too high for many organizations to want to adopt RFID technology. Which is why the projects of larger organizations such as Wal-Mart and the US DoD (Dept of Defence) are so important in helping bring prices down.
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