E-tagging could replace bar codes

The development of commercially viable thin-film radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be integrated into flexible packaging has taken a major leap forward after scientists made a significant technological breakthrough, Food Production Daily reports.

A European Union-funded research partnership, called ORICLA, has made a thin-film RFID tag that waits to receive a specific code from a tag reader before responding with information it has gathered.

A team from Imec's Holst Centre, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, developed the high-performance thin RFID tag that could be cheaply mass-produced and prevents data transfer from being interrupted, The Engineer states.

Kris Myny, an organic circuitry researcher at Imec, says: “On top of these applications, such RFID tags could be integrated with sensors for smart RFID tags. In this way, they could be integrated into food packaging to provide customers with information on freshness or characteristics of this product.”

One of the driving forces to create intelligent RFID tags is to make them intelligent and cheap enough to be printed and used on mass-produced retail products, EE Times Asia says.

Thin-film RFID chips are made on plastic foil, with organic or oxide thin-film semi-conductors.