Talking about the Technology Development and Application Field of Chipless 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 eventually be printed directly on the product and packaging at a cost of 0.1 cents, replacing the trillions of used barcodes each year with more flexible and reliable features.

With its wide application, RFID technology has become increasingly powerful. However, only when the price of the label, including the installation fee, drops below 1 centimeter, can it be fully implemented in the largest RFID application fields such as packaged consumer goods, mail items, medicines, and books. There are many advantages to using RFID, but considering it synthetically, it still cannot prove its greater advantage. The potential sales volume in these largest application areas is as high as 10 trillion per year. However, due to the high price of silicon chips, the market share base for such labels cannot be formed. Even without considering the cost of the silicon chip, the installation cost is equivalent to 95% of the bar code cost currently used, which means that most large-capacity RFID tags must be directly installed on products and packaging to ensure that the installation cost is less than 1 Cents. Coreless RFID technology surfaced under this demand.

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 eventually be printed directly on the product and packaging at a cost of 0.1 cents, replacing the trillions of used barcodes each year with more flexible and reliable features.

The mainstream of coreless tags is tags that can be digitally decoded like silicon chips and can work in more than a millimeter range. Their potential market exceeds the potential market for low-cost, high-volume tags because of their low price and other characteristics. In fact, the current sales price of this kind of label is higher than the silicon chip label in some cases, but in other cases the sales price is lower than the silicon chip label. This situation will continue for some time. Individual signatures and microwave-reflective fibers similar to magnetic strips or document paper on banknotes can be detected beyond a millimeter, so this is in line with our definition of RFID, but they are rarely used for counterfeiting. Therefore, we have only made a brief discussion in this report, and we ignore it in statistics.

In the next decade we will see a rapid increase in 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 labels will grow from 0.1% of US$1.2 million in 2006 to US$1.39 billion – a conservative estimate of 13% of RFID tag revenue in 2016, because most of the breakthrough growth depends on price advantage. . Including manufacturing, software and service industries, there will be a market of US$2.8 billion coreless RFID systems in 2016. Since then, coreless tags will quickly dominate the entire RFID market with the most technologically-aware chips, such as financial cards with microprocessors. The 5.8 GHz tag for non-parking roads or ultra-wideband tags for real-time positioning systems will continue to use silicon chips.

The first generation of coreless technology is a lot but rarely successful

The first generation of coreless technologies did not meet the open standards used by many service providers and did not attempt to establish such standards. There are many coreless technologies, including acousto-magnetic, electronically swept RF sensor capacitor arrays, and electromagnetic RF sputtered films—each of which is one of three commonly used anti-thief tags. Others are diode arrays, surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices and chemicals that emit high frequencies when moving. However, only the use of error-preventing acousto-magnetic labels and uninterrupted road tolls in medical care and sales of SAW labels used in manufacturing reached one million. AstraZeneca's acoustic and magnetic tags are at the top of the list, with annual sales of 4.5 million. However, this plan is difficult to further reduce costs, and there are also limitations such as the performance of rigidity. The main characteristic of most first-generation coreless technologies is that they are mainly used in small companies with insufficient funds, and they also have technical limitations and are difficult to apply to the market.

Second generation coreless RFID tags

Compared with the above first-generation coreless tags, SAW tags have been technically improved, the price has been greatly reduced, and they can store enough data and can use traditional chip RFID operations on the universal frequency band. This means that they can become the basis for large-scale closed-loop and open-loop systems. In fact, EPCglobal originally integrated SAW performance standards into ISO. The other two technologies are also promising. New participants have proposed electromagnetic labels based on conductive ink printed stripes on paper or low-cost plastic films. In addition, about forty companies are involved in thin film transistor circuits (TFTC)—most of them can print at high speed on low-cost plastic films. TFTCs can have the same circuitry as the silicon RFID chip, so the same frequency and standards as chip RFID can be used depending on the materials used. It is extremely important to be able to operate at 13.56MHz, as 55% of the labels made in the past work in this frequency band, and this proportion will reach 70% in 2016. This is also the preferred frequency for cards, tickets, libraries, laundries, drugs, and mailed items. The main commercial feature of the second generation of coreless technology is that they are supported by some large companies and well-funded small companies. Many of them are both sellers and users. These include IBM, HP Xerox, 3M, Toshiba, Dainippon, Toppan Printing and Samsung of Korea. Packaging and paper giants Mreal, MeadWestvaco and International Paper are also included. However, it is very difficult to balance these technologies. We summarize the specific situations in the table.

In addition, these technologies use non-toxic materials and have the potential to produce equipment with low cost compared to silicon chips.

The best specific application type

The most promising coreless technology will be best directed to a specific application area. In spite of that, in these fields of application and in many cases such as empty baggage and animals that do not meet their standards are not suitable. The best place to use the coreless tag is just some items (factory list, library, laundry, medicine, consumer goods, files, mail), tickets/banknotes/other large-capacity security documents, air parcels, animals, prisoners, parole People or hospitalized or warded persons, visitors with disabilities, leisure facilities, theme parks and other high-value logistics.

Finally, we have compared the application fields of chip-based RFID and chipless RFID technologies. Both technologies are competitive and complementary in some respects.