Printed RFID in 2010

A variety of factors are combining to give printed RFID a bright future

-- Packaging Digest, 1/7/2010 3:33:15 PM

In 2009, the RFID market grew to $5.56 billion, having almost tripled in five years. Being largely based on government backed military, identity card, financial card, passport and other projects and legally mandated requirements such as animal tagging, this market is basically recession proof, continuing to grow rapidly. Of the total, $2.18 billion consisted of passive tags, the prime candidate for being printed in future.

First to market with entirely printed transistor-based RFID is Kovio. The actual circuit printed by inkjet on stainless steel foil consists of about 1000 transistors. This is hugely significant for the future of RFID.

IDTechEx projects that the market for passive RFID tags will grow to over $10 billion in sales by 2019. Much of it will continue to use silicon chips: for example, a passport chip has over one million transistors and no one will print that anytime soon.

Countries that dominate
The largest database of RFID projects in the world is the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase which currently stands at 3900 projects in 111 countries including a large number of new projects that make the above forecasts credible. China and the USA spend by far the most money on RFID and China will soon overtake the UK in number of projects. (Japan and China tend to have a smaller number of projects but they are much larger in value).

Printed antennas
The antennas on some RFID tags have been printed for some time. Indeed, in 2007, Hyan Label in China printed HF RFID antennas directly onto paper adhesive labels reel to reel. These gave university students a discount on the Chinese railway system. Checkpoint prints UHF antennas for its tags today. However, all this involves the precious metal silver which is subject to price hikes and, on the occasion of the last hike, Avery Dennison reverted to non-printed aluminum for its UHF RFID antennas. It is hoped that nanosilver inks and dissolved silver inks can result in lower antenna costs and less exposure to silver prices because they use much less silver per antenna. However, these inks are more expensive, partially offsetting the benefit and adoption in mass production is still awaited. The new printable copper ink may be another breakthrough here.

Printed HF RFID in 2010
The main cost of the tag is the silicon chip of course. So far, no passive RFID tags have been fully printed beyond experiments and trials because scale up and performance has proved troublesome. However, Kovio is well advanced with inkjet printed nanosilicon on stainless steel foil, having provided HF tags for secret trials to the world's favorite RFID specification ISO 14443. PolyIC promises demonstrator kits of printed transistor RFID on its website in 2010. These will be for ISO 14443 RFID with the tags made by printing organic semiconductors reel to reel. This does not involve ink jet printing. The number of transistors and therefore the performance of these tags may be less but they may be lower cost in the end and they employ polyester substrate. Because of conductivity and cost problems with organic conductors, we expect PolyIC to print or plate metal antennas. 

In 2009, Motorola, ORFID and OrganicID dropped out of the race for printed organic RFID but Holst Research Centre in the Netherlands with high bit rates and Sunchon University in Korea and Paru in Korea, using simple conventional printing technology, are among those making impressive demonstrations of organic printed RFID. All that is at HF (13.56 MHz), where most RFID money is spent. That market is in the form of cards, tickets, laundry tags, logistics, passport pages and library labels in the main.