Interactive Print - Near Field Communications

UPM Raflatac is introducing new optimized DogBone, ShortDipole and Frog RFID products.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Attendance at the annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA 2008 event, in San Jose, Calif., Dec 3-4, reached almost 700 people from 22 countries.

GREEN BAY, Wis.—WS Packaging Group, Inc. and ASK, a France-headquartered company, have formed ASK-intTag LLC, a joint venture that will manufacture and market contactless cards and tickets for U.S. and Canadian markets.

AUSTIN, Texas—RF Code, Inc. has released an on-command beaconing solution that enables customers to control an active RFID tag’s beaconing  by simply wanding over it.

The key element of the tools is the patented pulsed light technology which uses proprietary lamps to deliver the energy required to effect the desired material changes. In Q2 of 2008, Plextronics' organic photovoltaic technology achieved a world record in the conversion of solar light to power efficiency. The 5.98% result, achieved on a 50 mm x 50 mm substrate, established a new world record for single layer organic solar cells and was certified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Plastic Logic had to develop methods for manufacturing high-resolution transistor arrays at low-temperatures. Based on ISO 14443 standards, this product features integrated synchronous analog, logic, anti-collision, and read-only memory blocks. Epson Epson has invested substantially in developing inkjet printing technologies for electronics, and wins the IDTechEx Commercialization Award for commercializing the technology in large-scale deployments. [...] at the Sharp Kameyama plant in Japan, Epson's inkjet printing technology is employed to print the color filters for Gen 8 (2160 x 2460 mm) displays.

Even where a thinner battery is needed and footprint is not a constraint, the choice is usually coin cells not the laminar batteries made by an increasing number of businesses. Because their products can cost ten times as much as coin cells, the laminar batteries are usually having success only where the need for thinness and flexibility is extreme. [...] several smart skin patches are about to be announced that incorporate printed batteries and such things as electronic swing tags for apparel retailing are near to significant orders thanks to the tremendous payback from adjusting prices remotely. [...] they should take high volume orders even at a loss so they can get economy of scale and get down the experience curve. [...] they must be standardised.

The factory’s capacity is scalable to hundreds of millions of pieces annually, according to market demand.Manufacture in Southern China’s Guangdong province provides definitive advantages, such as being close to existing and potential customers and direct access to the Chinese market. “The opportunity to operate locally gives us a solid base for growth in the Asian market and at the same time validates our position as the globally leading manufacturer of RFID tags and inlays,” says Christer Härkönen, Senior Vice President of UPM Raflatac’s RFIDbusiness.In the Asian market, UPM Raflatac serves several RFID end-use areas including apparel, ticketing, supply chain management, pharmaceutical, media management, transportation and industrial.

According to NanoMarkets' analysis and forecast, sales of such inks will see declines for the next few years before the market begins a recovery in 2011. [...] as inflationary pressures resume in 2010 NanoMarkets expects renewed impetus for alternative approaches to conductive inks.About the ReportNanoMarkets' report, Silver Inks and Pastes for Printable Electronics: 2008-2015 (Revised Edition), quantifies the opportunities for silver inks in both traditional applications and in RFID, Photovoltaics, Displays, Sensors and Lighting.

By Dr. Peter Harrop, chairman, IDTechEx The RFID business is quintupling in value in the next ten years but the Active RFID business is growing about ten times, driven by such business as the $475 million military order currently being serviced by Savi Technology and innovations such as the first 100,000 Active RFID labels from Power ID with greatly enhanced range over passive alternatives. Within Active RFID, the market for Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) is projected to grow even faster - from $145 million today to $2.7 billion in 2018. Several analysts have come up with broadly similar figures to these projected by

The RFID star isn’t shining quite as brightly as it was when Wal-Mart mandated that crates and pallets from its top 100 suppliers carry RFID tags. Once heralded as the next big thing in packaging, RFID usage still has not made it all the way down to the item level on a widespread basis. Still, it incorporates one of the first implementations of printed electronics and comes to mind for many when printed electronics is mentioned. However, printed electronics does not just mean RFID, and package printers may want to educate themselves now about it to become experts before their competition does. While the