Read our ISSCC 2008 coverage of the San Francisco conference
At this year's ISSCC, Holst Centre has presented a plastic 64-bit inductively-coupled passive RFID tag operating at 13.56MHz. According to the organisation, it claims a record 780bit/s data readout of 64 bits over 10cm and that the tag generates a 5-fold higher bit rate compared to state-of-the-art plastic RFID systems.
Holst Centre - which was founded by the Belgian nanoelectronics research centre IMEC and the Dutch research centre TNO in 2005 - boasts that the achievement paves the way for low-cost high-volume RFID tags to replace barcodes.
Development of the tag was done within the framework of the Holst Centre research programme on organic circuitry and was co-funded by the European project POLYAPPLY.
The Holst Centre describes the RFID system as consisting of a low-cost inductive antenna, capacitor, plastic rectifier and plastic circuit, all on foil. The LC antenna resonates at 13.56MHz and powers up the organic rectifier with an AC voltage at this frequency. From this voltage, it states, the rectifier generates the DC supply voltage for the 64-bit organic transponder chip which drives the modulation transistor between the on and off state with a 64bit code sequence.
The foil with the transponder chip was processed with organic electronics technology provided by Polymer Vision, a partner Holst Centre and a pioneer of rollable display mobile devices.