BALTIMORE — At the International Electronics Devices Meeting here, Holst Centre, imec and TNO presented a paper on what they claim to be the world-first organic transponder circuit with a bit rate of 50kbits/s. This bit rate approaches the requirements for the Electronic Product Coding (EPC) standards.

Flexible circuits offer ruggedness during processing as well as in the final product, a property which makes them appealing for new applications such as plastic RFID tags for object tagging.

However, for widespread application, plastic RFID technology should adhere maximally to the standard Electronic Product Code (EPC) specifications for item-level tagging. The standards require a bit rate of the order of 50 kb/s.

Holst Centre, together with imec and TNO, developed an 8-bit flexible transponder circuit on foil using pentacene as semiconductor material and a high-k gate dielectric. The current drive of this technology enables a data rate of greater than 50 kbits/s for the circuit.

Earlier versions of such organic circuits had a bit rate limited to 1-2 kbits/s.

The Electronic Product Code or in short EPC standard has been developed for wireless identification in high-volume logistics applications like retail. It is widely used already today e.g. on pallet level logistics. The next step is to use EPC tags on package level and on a longer term target on individual items ("item-level tagging").

Amazing what collaborative research can do. There should be more of it.