Roll up: Plastic RFID tags printed with a roll-to-roll process could replace barcodes if developers can get the price down to a penny or less.
Gyou-Jin Cho/Sunchon National University
Plastic RFID tags will be the first product to use printed nanotube transistors.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags have made paying toll fees and public transit fares a breeze. But the tags, which are made of silicon, are still too expensive to replace ubiquitous barcodes to similarly speed up grocery store checkout lines by remotely scanning a product while it's still in the basket.
Cheap plastic RFID tags could soon change that. Researchers in Sunchon, South Korea, have printed RFID circuits on plastic films using a combination of industrial methods: roll-to-roll printing, ink-jet printing, and silicone rubber-stamping. They use inks containing various materials--silver, carbon nanotubes, and a nanoparticle-polymer hybrid--to deposit the circuit's components, such as capacitors and transistors, layer by layer.
Gyoujin Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon National University, who led the work, estimates that the tags cost three cents apiece. To replace barcodes, RFID tags will need to cost a penny or less. But Cho says this should be achievable if all the layers on a tag can be deposited with a roll-to-roll process. A version of the current prototype that is capable of holding useful amounts of data should be on the market later this year, he says.
The new RFID tags will be the first product to use printed transistors made from carbon nanotubes. Researchers have been developing nanotube inks for a decade, but the only nanotube electronic product on the market so far is a film for display electrodes. Rick Jansen at carbon nanotube ink maker SouthWest NanoTechnologies says that good quality nanotube inks that are uniform and viscous enough to print have been costly to produce.
Making transistors using nanotube ink is also hard because mixtures are typically two-thirds semiconducting and one-third metallic, and the metallic component makes the mixture conducting overall. Cho and researchers at Paru Corporation in Sunchon have patented a simple process to make nanotube inks semiconducting. They coat the metallic tubes in the solution with a polymer. "You shake them with certain polymers and wrap them up and you just leave them in," says Rice University chemistry professor James Tour, who was also involved in the new work.
The resulting transistors are large and don't perform on par with silicon devices. But, says Tour, "RFID tags are a perfect application for them because you only need a handful of bits."
Making transistor arrays that control the pixels in a flexible display with nanotube ink would be more challenging. "With displays you need better transistors," he says. "We can print small transistors with carbon nanotube inks, but printing a large number of them with good alignment is hard." Nevertheless, Cho says, the Korean team is working on making display control circuits with their nanotube transistors.
A new company puts silicon transistors on plastic for flexible displays.
technology review needs more literature review
This is a really nice article and it appears like RFID really might be an area where nanotubes can make a difference. Carbon nanotubes are the best conductive polymers around.. and if printed RFID is ever going to work, this is definitely the right technology path.
However, I was really disappointed to read the statements & claims made in the article about lack of scalable roll-to-roll coating techniques available for nanotube inks. It just shows the lack of awareness about existing literature among the authors.
A very informative article about coating carbon nanotube inks using conventional roll-to-roll methods can be found here: "ACS Nano, 2009, 3 (4), pp 835–843". Also, several start up companies like Unidym, Eikos etc are already using various forms of roll coating to fabricate films and electrodes of carbon nanotubes at very low costs.
I hope Technology Review would run a review article covering the advances in carbon nanotube ink formulation and the recent publications demonstrating the feasibility of low cost, high throughput roll-to-roll coating using nanotubes.
Does anybody have thought about the privacy concerns. A lot can be found out about a person just looking at their trash! Now people could drive by your trash bag and scan you trash bags and know exactly what you bought! Not that I would care much but that is something that people should be made aware!
Uniquely serialized RFID is one of the most potentially dangerous to privacy technologies out there.
This is why the MIT AutoID Center included a hard "kill" command in the EPC standard - to allow consumers the choice to kill the tags upon purchase if desired.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
National Instruments has gathered customer information and data regarding some of the cost differences between building a custom solution versus using NI off-the-shelf tools. Using this data, we built the Graphical System Design ‘Build vs. Buy’ Calculator. The calculator can help show the financial differences between building a custom solution versus buying an off-the-shelf system. This paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of both a traditional custom design approach and off-the-shelf embedded tools.
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jjaenisch
10 Comments
Disposal of RFID Chips
What happens to these RFID markers once they are used? If they become as ubiquitous as barcodes on packaging, then I feel they will increasingly enter our waste stream. Are there any toxins in these chips or compounds that we would rather not have to deal with later on down the road? Or can they be recycled? Though I doubt anyone would want to remove such tags each time they buy a product.
I guess RFID sounds like a technology that would make things easier, but considering that I'm fine spending 2 minutes at a supermarket checkout, rather than 30 seconds for my basket to be scanned when full of RFID tagged products, I feel we should be asking questions about the widespread use of these and the impact of disposal procedures...
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dtutelman
116 Comments
Re: Disposal of RFID Chips
jjaenisch's point about the supermarket checkout led me on an interesting train of thought. I put on my technology forecaster's hat, and saw a very different checkout experience, not just a quantitative difference in checkout time.
Of course, it helped that I was at the supermarket yesterday. Reviewing the clerk's "time and motion" as well as my own, scanning is hardly the big time consumer. At least as much time is spent moving items from cart to conveyor belt, bagging, loading the bags into the cart, and paying (even if the payment is done with the now-omnipresent self-service card scanner). So there is some saving of time, but nowhere near the 75% in the estimate above.
Next, I visualized what would happen with whatever savings there was. Would the store manager fail to notice the shorter lines at the cash register? Perhaps even more idle checkout clerks? Not likely! Employee count will be reduced, allowing a cost savings for the store, not a time savings for the customer.
Thus motivated, the store manager will notice that a lot of the time is spent bagging and loading/unloading the cart. But RFID allows (potentially, anyway) the scanning of items that are already bagged. How about taking some of the space that used to be occupied by more cash registers, and using it for stations where customers can do their own bagging? That way, I'll hit the checkout line already bagged.
That done, why have a checkout clerk at all. Reduce the manual checkout to one line for "problem cases", and make automatic checkout the norm.
I don't know whether you view this as an improvement in cost and convenience or a degradation of personal service. Either way, I predict that is where widespread use of RFID will steer us.
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colin_young
1 Comment
Re: Disposal of RFID Chips
You're missing the obvious solution: bag as you shop. Stop and Shop already offers that with their portable bar-code scanners and a loyalty card in some stores. No need for a bagging station and you'll just breeze through a checkout frame where your groceries will be automatically tallied and the payment automatically deducted from your RFID enabled bank card. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course we still need to get past the supermarket mentality of artificially limiting the supply of self check out lanes by keeping some of them closed.
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dtutelman
116 Comments
Re: Disposal of RFID Chips
Colin, you're right on target with all observations.
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TekE
5 Comments
Re: Disposal of RFID Chips
I do agree that this technology should be evaluated regarding toxicity prior to any widespread deployment.
With that said, I would like to point out that there may be some potential benefits to having RFID tags in the recycling and waste disposal processes. Concerning recycling, the RFID tags could aid automated sorting, e.g., containers could be placed on a conveyor belt, the RFID tag would be read and a database lookup would yield information on the type of container, and the container would then either be routed to the appropriate recycling stream (glass, metal, specific plastic type, etc.) or passed on for human inspection if the tag is damaged or nonexistent.
Waste disposal could benefit by excluding hazardous items from the waste stream. The tags could be scanned either at time of pickup or at the disposal facility, and once again, database lookup would yield information on any special disposal requirements and the offending item could be retrieved. While it is true that such technology would not thwart someone who intentionally removed the tag, it would still be useful to prevent inadvertent dumping of hazardous materials in landfills.
These functions would be performed by scanning the same "UPC replacement" RFID tags as in the the example of the supermarket environment.
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