Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are still too pricey to be used to track individual goods such as toothpaste tubes and soup cans at the supermarket, but a project at Xerox Corp.'s Canadian research centre is aimed at making them cheap enough to use on just about anything.
The small electronic tags store information that can be read when they pass within a few inches or a few feet (depending on the type of tag) of a reader. RFID is already used in lots of places where the cost of the tags - currently starting at around 20 cents for the simplest ones - is not a major issue. If you can unlock your car by pressing a button on your key fob, you're using RFID. If you have pets with implanted microchips to identify them if they are lost, that's RFID. If you carry an access or payment card that works without having to be swiped in a magnetic card reader, that's probably RFID too. The tags are also being attached to crates and pallets of goods to help track them during shipping.
The ultimate dream of the RFID industry, though, is to tag every item in a store, replacing product bar codes. They would be used to track products from the warehouse through to the checkout line, they'd make taking inventory cheap and easy, and even allow marketers to learn about customer behaviour. For instance, RFID tags, unlike bar codes, could let a store determine how often customers pick up an item and then return it to the shelf, or whether an item sells better from a special display than from its regular place on the shelves.
"Item-level tagging is what everyone has wanted for years, and it's not feasible with most products yet," said Paul Heino, chief executive of Sundex Information Systems Inc., a Toronto firm that helps companies with RFID and wireless data collection, at a recent seminar on RFID in Montreal.
Item-level tagging has started to make inroads, says Sara Shah, an analyst at ABI Research Inc. in Oyster Bay, N.Y, but is used mostly for higher-priced items such as consumer electronics and pharmaceuticals. Item-level tagging won't really be feasible for low-cost goods such as grocery produce or toothbrushes until the cost of the tags falls to a nickel or so.
That's where the Xerox centre's research comes in. With the silicon technology used to manufacture most chips, including those in today's RFID tags, it should be possible to get the price of a mass-produced tag down to around 10 cents, says Hadi Mahabadi, vice-president of Xerox's Innovation Group and director of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) in Mississauga. But printed organic electronics - a way of printing integrated circuits using ink-like materials that act as conductors, semiconductors and insulators - could push that below five cents.
XRCC handles materials research for Xerox worldwide, and it is working on materials for use in printed organic electronics. Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) is working on the printing technology needed to make those materials into circuits.
The process requires three materials, Dr. Mahabadi says. Most polymers - the molecules found in plastics - are insulators, and these can be printed quite easily. The semiconductor material will also be a type of polymer, he says. For the more complex conductor, XRCC researchers are working with tiny particles of silver suspended in a solvent that will evaporate after being applied to the tag, leaving a layer of silver behind.
Printed organic electronics can't provide the fine level of detail the conventional chip-making process can, Ms. Shah says, so it won't be used to make powerful computer processors any time soon. But for low-cost, low-powered chips such as those required for RFID, it has great promise.
The technology will take a few more years to reach the stage of producing commercial products in volume - Ms. Shah estimates 2010. That fits the needs of the RFID market well, she adds, because manufacturers, distributors and retailers are still focused on tagging large pallets and cases, and will need some time to get the infrastructure in place to handle item-level tagging.
