RFID’s Road Ahead

Back here in the present, with the technology still in its early stages, there is no standard route to involvement for the converter. The most common starting point, inlay-level integration, entails inserting functioning RFID inlays between a label’s facestock and liner. Dr. Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx, sees many converters making these “inserts” off-line, and then incorporating them into the press line. Going a step further, strap-level integration enables the converter to manufacture the inlay by printing its antenna onto the label’s face stock and attaching a strap (a chip on a carrier substrate) to the antenna.