What Is an RFID Tag Microchip?

Chipless RFID is a type of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which consists of a tag, an interpreter, and a data transmission and processing system.

Chipless RFID

The main potential advantage of the most promising coreless labels is that they can eventually be printed directly on products and packaging at a cost of 0.1 cents, replacing the one trillion trillion barcodes per year with more flexible and reliable features.

With the widespread use, RFID technology is becoming increasingly powerful. However, only when tag prices, including installation costs, fall below 1 cent, will full implementation be possible in the largest RFID applications such as consumer packaging, postal items, pharmaceuticals, and books. There are many benefits to using RFID, but a comprehensive consideration does not prove that it has greater advantages. The potential sales volume of these largest application fields is as high as ten trillion yuan each year, but because silicon chips are expensive, they cannot yet form the basis for market share of such tags. Even if the cost of the silicon chip is not taken into account, the installation cost is equivalent to 95% of the cost of the bar code used, which means that most large-capacity RFID tags must be directly installed on the product and packaging to ensure that the installation cost is less than $ 1. Minute. Coreless RFID technology has surfaced with this demand.

The application of coreless RFID technology is used in factory roster, library, laundry, medicine, consumer goods, archives, mail, tickets / banknotes / other high-volume security documents, air parcels, animals, prisoners, parole personnel or hospitalized or guarded People, people with disabilities, visitors to leisure facilities, theme parks and other high-value logistics. ^[1]

What is coreless RFID?

Coreless RFID tags refer to radio frequency identification tags that do not contain silicon chips. The main potential advantage of the most promising coreless labels is that they can ultimately be printed directly on products and packaging at a cost of 0.1 cents, replacing the one trillion trillion barcodes per year with more flexible and reliable features.

In the next ten years, we will see a rapid increase in the market share of coreless labels. Global sales will increase from 5 million, which accounted for 0.4% in 2006, to 267 billion, which accounted for 45% in 2016. In terms of value, coreless tags will grow from $ 1.2 million, which accounted for only 0.1% in 2006, to $ 1.39 billion-a conservative estimate of 13% of RFID tag revenue in 2016, because most of the breakthrough growth is based on price advantages . Including manufacturing, software, and service industries, there will be a $ 2.8 billion market for coreless RFID systems in 2016. Thereafter, coreless tags will quickly dominate the entire RFID market through the most technologically-savvy chips, such as financial cards with microprocessors. 5.8 GHz tags for non-parking road tolls or UWB tags for real-time positioning systems will continue to use silicon chips.

First-generation coreless technology has many but few successes

The first generation of coreless technology did not meet open standards used by many service providers, and no attempt was made to develop such standards. There are many coreless technologies, including acoustic magnetic, electronically swept RF sensor capacitor arrays, and electromagnetic RF sputter filmseach of which is one of three commonly used anti-theft tags. Others include diode arrays, surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices that emit high frequencies when moving, and chemicals. However, only error-avoiding acousto-magnetic tags and non-stop road tolls used in medical care, and SAW tags used in manufacturing have reached one million sales. AstraZeneca's Acoustic Magnetic Tag tops the list, with annual sales of 4.5 million. However, this plan is difficult to reduce costs further, and there are performance limitations such as rigidity. The main feature of most first-generation coreless technology is that it is mainly applied to small companies with insufficient funds, and there are technical limitations that make it difficult to apply to the market.

Second generation coreless RFID tags

Compared with the above first-generation coreless tags, SAW tags have improved in technology, but the price has dropped significantly, and they can store enough data and can use traditional chip RFID operations in general frequency bands. This means they can be the basis for large-scale closed-loop and open-loop systems. In fact, the SAW performance standard was originally integrated into ISO by EPCglobal. Two other technologies are also promising. New participants have come up with stripe-based electromagnetic labels printed with conductive inks based on paper or low-priced plastic films. In addition, about forty companies work on thin-film transistor circuits (TFTCs) most of which are capable of high-speed printing on low-cost plastic films. TFTCs can have the same circuits as silicon RFID chips. Therefore, due to the limitations of the materials used, the same frequency and standard as chip RFID can be used. It is extremely important to be able to operate at 13.56MHz, as 55% of tags manufactured in the past are working in this frequency band, and this proportion will reach 70% in 2016. This is also the preferred frequency for cards, tickets, libraries, laundry, medicine and mailing items. The main commercial feature of second-generation coreless technology is that they are supported by some large companies and small companies with sufficient funds. Many of them are both sellers and users. These include IBM, HP Xerox, 3M, Toshiba, Dainippon Printing, Toppan Printing, and Samsung Samsung. Packaging and paper giants Mreal, MeadWestvaco and International Paper are also included. However, balancing these techniques is difficult, and we summarize the situation in a table.

In addition, these technologies use non-toxic materials and have the potential for lower production equipment costs compared to silicon chips.

Best Specific Application Type

The most promising coreless technologies are best oriented to specific application areas. Nonetheless, in these areas of application and many situations such as air baggage and animals that do not meet their standards are not suitable. The best places to use coreless tags are just items (factory roster, library, laundry, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, archives, mail), tickets / banknotes / other large-volume security documents, air parcels, animals, prisoners, parole Personnel or hospitalized or supervised personnel, persons with disabilities, visitors to leisure facilities, theme parks and other high-value logistics.

Finally, we have compared the application areas of chip RFID and chipless RFID technology. The two technologies are both competitive and complementary in some aspects.