Roll to Roll Printed Nano-based RFID tags Uses Carbon Nanotube Infused Ink

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CREDIT: GYOU-JIN CHO/SUNCHON NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RFID tags printed through a new roll-to-roll process could replace bar codes and make checking out of a store a snap.

Rice University and Korean collaborators produce printable tag that could replace bar codes Cho and his team are developing the electronics as well as the roll-to-roll printing process that, he said, will bring the cost of printing the tags down to a penny apiece and make them ubiquitous. It should be commercialized in five years. The roll-to-roll carbon nanotube electronics would be the first of increasingly complex and more capable inexpensive printable electronics.

Rice researchers, in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, have come up with an inexpensive, printable transmitter that can be invisibly embedded in packaging. It would allow a customer to walk a cart full of groceries or other goods past a scanner on the way to the car; the scanner would read all items in the cart at once, total them up and charge the customer’s account while adjusting the store’s inventory.

More advanced versions could collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time.

Cho, Tour and their teams reported in the journal a three-step process to print one-bit tags, including the antenna, electrodes and dielectric layers, on plastic foil. Cho’s lab is working on 16-bit tags that would hold a more practical amount of information and be printable on paper as well.

There are several hurdles to commercialization. First, the device must be reduced to the size of a bar code, about a third the size of the one reported in the paper, Tour said. Second, its range must increase.

Tour allayed concerns about the fate of nanotubes in packaging. “The amount of nanotubes in an RFID tag is probably less than a picogram. That means you can produce one trillion of them from a gram of nanotubes – a miniscule amount. Our HiPco reactor produces a gram of nanotubes an hour, and that would be enough to handle every item in every Walmart.

“In fact, more nanotubes occur naturally in the environment, so it’s not even fair to say the risk is minimal. It’s infinitesimal.”

The technology reported in the March issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.

All-Printed and Roll-to-Roll-Printable 13.56-MHz-Operated 1-bit RF Tag on Plastic Foils

An all-printed rectifier that can provide at least 10 V dc from a 13.56-MHz radio frequency identification (RFID) reader and an all-printed ring oscillator that can generate at least 100 Hz of clock signal to read a 96-bit RFID tag in a second under the dc power provided by the rectifier should first be printable on plastic foils for the realization of roll-to-roll (R2R) printed ultralow cost RFID tags. Here, we describe a practical way to provide all-printed and R2R-printable antenna, rectifiers, and ring oscillators on plastic foils and demonstrate 13.56-MHz-operated 1-bit RF tags. The all-printed and R2R-printable 13.56-MHz 1-bit tags can generate 102.8 Hz of clock signal as the tag approaches the 13.56-MHz RFID reader.

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