UK imprint lithography start-up PragmatIC has tied up with paper firm De La Rue to develop printed electronic security products.
The £600,000 project is called RAIL (remotely activated interactive labels) and is partly supported by the Government’s Technology Strategy Board.
“PragmatIC and De La Rue have completed prototypes of a range of concepts applicable to security printing markets, following the broad premise of a light or logo that is triggered by consumer interaction,” said PragmatIC.
So a genuine branded product could carry a hard-to-fake label that would visibly change at the check-out to prove it was the real thing.
PragmatIC's electrochromic display allow's De La Rue's logo to appear spontaneously and then fade away over a minute.
“The logos use printed electrochromic displays that change colour when they are activated,” PragmatIC CEO Scott White told Electronics Weekly. “They are not emissive or bistable, they hold their image for a minute or so after activation.”
Are they durable?
I carry one around in my pocket with no trouble,” said White.
The lit product use conventional LEDs in thin packages.
No battery is required, with power coming wirelessly from standard RFID or NFC (near field communications) readers, so the labels can be flexible and only around 50µm thick.
“PragmatIC’s imprint-based approach to printed electronics is a natural complement to other security printing technologies such as holographic embossing,” said Philip Cooper, head of ideas at De La Rue.
The prototypes will be demonstrated at the Tax Stamp Forum in Washington next week.
PragmatIC acquired the printed electronics business of Nano ePrint in 2010, including its intellectual property for planar electronic devices fabricated in a single layer of semiconductor through single-step imprint patterning.
“We have extended this process to allow a range of device and circuit architectures to be printed in transparent, flexible semiconductors at micron and sub-micron scale,” said the firm.