The Printed RFID Markets Report Profiles the Activities of 11 Organizations Involved With the Development and Manufacture of Printed RFID Products

Radio frequency identification (RFID) promises a major new revolution in information technology. It can bring enhanced productivity to supply chain management, inventory control, package tracking and a host of other business functions. However, to be widely deployed, RFID tags must be manufactured at exceptionally low cost. Printed electronics offers a way to achieve this goal. This report reviews the market for printed RFID; both complete tags and antennas. It examines the potential of the latest developments in RFID, including the performance of the first commercial 13 MHz tags to hit the market; research on printed UHF tags; and the impact of printed silicon electronics on the manufacture of RFID tags. It also profiles the activities of 11 organizations involved with the development and manufacture of printed RFID products and provides both an update on the exciting new developments in this field and an eight-year forecast of revenues from the printed RFID sector in volume and value terms.

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Printed RFID

RFID holds out the hope to businesses that they can continue to implement IT-based productivity increases, just as the increases associated with the deployment of PCs and networking are beginning to decline. The promise of RFID includes enhanced ability to track inventory in the supply chain, provide real-time visibility of items in transit, and generally manage items in warehouses and stores to a much greater degree. Longer term, RFID is seen as a critical factor in a future "Internet of Things," and as a replacement for the barcode, the reason that RFIDs were originally developed in the 1990s. One key advantage of RFIDs over barcodes is that they don't need to be in the line of sight in order to be read—which is required for the optical readers that are used with barcodes. This means they can be made part of distributed networks that provide information on inventory and sales.

Initial benefits that are expected from the use of RFID include serialized data (unique ID numbers for each item,) reduced human intervention, more rapidly functioning supply chains, better realtime information on supply chains, and enhanced security. More futuristic visions of where RFID is headed need to be balanced against the fact that what is being talked about here is nothing less than the implementation of an entirely new kind of IT system. As those who can remember the deployment of the first PC networks in the 1980s will affirm, this kind of thing can take a while; often much longer than technology advocates expect. On a more positive note, the pattern with this kind of technology is that it will initially prove in as a way to implement automation for existing business processes, and as it does entirely new ways to use RFID tags will be found.

But there is a cost issue. RFID tags will only reach the kinds of volumes that some experts expect for them if they can be implemented ubiquitously and this in turn means that RFIDs must be very low cost if they are going to be used on (say) a cornflakes package. This is really a manufacturing issue; how is the RFID tag manufactured most cheaply? Part of the answer to this question is clearly volume. The more RFID tags are produced, the cheaper they will be, of course. But there is also a deeper issue, which is what particular mode of production will be used to create them.

The advocates of printed electronics claim that their manufacturing technology of choice has much to recommend it in terms of bringing down the cost of RFID tags. RFID antennas are already printed commercially, but the crucial issue is whether RFID chips could be printed at costs that fall below those associated with conventional manufacturing approaches; most RFID chips are today traditional ICs created in amortized fabs. And within the context of printed electronics itself, there is the open question as to whether RFID processing power will be created with organic inks or some kind of silicon materials.

All this is of critical importance to the future of printed electronics; not to mention the future of RFID. This is because the volumes implicit in the RFID value proposition are potentially very large and much of the revenue expected to emerge from the printed electronics sector over the next decade can be traced back to RFID. The RFID sector also has the distinction of being one of the few sizeable segments of the printed electronics business that has nothing to do with displays. So far the experience of printed electronics in this sector has been mixed. The first volume production of printed RFID tags has started to occur, but these early tags lack performance. And some of the firms that were intimately involved in this technology a year or two back seem to have moved on to other things.

Key Topics Covered:

-Printed electronics market overview

chapter two: the evolution of printed electronics technology and the birth of an industry

Materials and Production Issues: Improvements and Outstanding Issues

Mega-Drivers for Printable Electronics

How Printed Electronics Can "Save" the Electronics Industry

Dawn of an Industry?

-Printed RFID

RFID Technology

Active and Passive Tags

Generations of RFIDs

Frequency Issues

Failure Rate

Privacy

-The value proposition of printing RFID

Arguments for Printing RFID

The Limits of Printing RFID and Arguments Against It

-RFID pricing

-printed RFID technology

Antennas

Tags

Memory

-current and future applications for printed RFID

Palette-level Tagging

Item-level Tagging

Animal and People Tracking

Other Applications

The PRISMA Project

-firms and research institutes to watch in the printed RFID space

GSI Technologies: Printed Antennas

IMEC

Kovio

Motorola

ORFID

OrganicID

Philips

PolyIC

-printed systems

RSI ID Technologies

Semprius

-eight-year forecasts of printed RFID markets

What Has Changed in the Past Year

Summary of Forecasts

Acronyms and Abbreviations Used in this Report

About the Authors

-list of exhibits

Exhibit 1: Major Economic Drivers for Printed Electronics

Exhibit 2: Industry Sector "Crises" and How TOP Electronics Can Help

Exhibit 3: TFE's Partners

Exhibit 4: TFE's Printed Memory Specs

Exhibit 5: Selected RFID Applications

Exhibit 6: Forecast of Printed RFID Revenues ($ Millions)

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/1edad5/printed_rfid_marke


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Source: rfidglobal