Printed and Chipless RFID Forecasts, Technologies & Players

The biggest opportunity for RFID is the item level tagging of all things - demanding trillions of tags yearly. This ultimately calls for a tag costing 0.1 cents and deposited directly onto the item itself, such as by printing. Printed and Chipless RFID technologies have already demonstrated or have the potential to achieve this. Interestingly, few of the biggest chip RFID suppliers are working on these technologies. Instead, printers, packagers and electronics companies are leading development, some seeing the ultra low cost RFID tag as just the beginning - with integrated ultra low cost components such as displays, sensors and power to come. This is the only report to cover the technologies, players, opportunities and challenges of what will be the most widely used RFID technologies. Detailed forecasts are given and global progress assessed.

 

Printed and chipless RFID tags can be electronically interrogated to reveal ID and other data. They do not contain a microchip and therefore can cost much less than chip RFID. From being just 0.8% of the RFID market in 2007 with cumulative sales of 125 million chipless tags to date (compared to 4157 million chip RFID), chipless devices have the potential to grow to 62.3% of the market in 2017. Ultimately, the end game of RFID will be that RFID is almost free, in the same way that barcodes are today, and which are printed onto every item.

 

 

Source: IDTechEx

 

There are ten different types of RFID technologies that do not contain a microchip, these work on different principles. Some versions can be fully printed. Some of the biggest names in the business now offer both chip and Chipless RFID in order to cover a full range of user needs. From AstraZeneca to Calvin Klein, companies are already using them in large volumes and many paper and packaging companies have licensed the various processes.

 

Printed and chipless RFID can operate to over 10 meters range and 256 bits of data, can cost one tenth of their silicon chip equivalents and have a greater physical performance. Printed and chipless RFID can be materials based, or it can consist of transistorless circuits. Transparent polymer transistor circuits are now also available from Philips, PolyIC, OrganicID and Motorola among others. These directly mimic the circuit on a chip. All this will means printed and chipless technology is addressing mainstream RFID applications and will rapidly grow the market by price reductions of one to two magnitudes.

 

We also cover radar arrays which operate at 60GHz, offer anticollision and read ranges of up to 300 foot, along with the low frequency, sub 0.001 cent cost printed RFID stripes which have already been sold in 700,000 gaming cards in Germany. All the technologies, players, challenges and opportunities are covered in this comprehensive report.

For the lowest cost technologies, we consider how the cost structure will probably not be on a per tag basis, where the value of the tags in hundreds of billions is only a few million dollars, but those involved will make money on licensing the technology, readers, data management etc. This is similar to barcodes today - the money spent on barcodes is negligible unlike when they were first invented and applied as a separate label.

 

Source: IDTechEx

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In addition, the report price also includes free access to the electronic version of the IDTechEx Encyclopedia of Printed Electronics 2007 with over 380 definitions and 30 illustrations. This 110 page report is normally sold for $1500.00.

If you have any questions about this report, please do not hesitate to contact Corinne Jennings or call + 44 1223 813703.