UPM Keeps Its Eye on RFID

According to Raflatac, the tag orders of the Finnish plant's largest customer keep one of the production lines occupied most of the time.

Most customer inlay orders require a four-week turnaround. "It's about three to four weeks from getting an order to shipping finished products," says Terävä. "We need to order antennas, calibrate the production line to antenna pad size [the area on the antenna that the chip is attached to], attach the ICs, laminate the inlays and carry out the final inspection."

The antenna maker says it plans to move its production line to its Helsinki facility by the middle of next year.

Raflatac produces inlays using both copper and aluminium antennas and utilizing integrated circuits from a number of semiconductor companies. The customer and the specific application normally determine which ICs come from which manufacturer. Raflatac's production lines attach the ICs, which arrive on 6- or 8-inch-diameter wafers, to the antennas mounted on a wide-web substrate spooled on reels. Sample inlays are tested on the production lines, and if the yield of functioning inlays is not high enough, the reel of antennas is removed from the machine and returned to the antenna manufacturer as faulty, so that additional ICs are not wasted on nonfunctioning inlays.

After the ICs and antennas have been joined, the resulting inlays are laminated with plastic or paper to seal and secure them. The laminated inlay is then printed with a die-cutting register mark (required by label converting machines, which use the mark as a guide for inlay placement).

Customers receive the reels of inlay tested, and any nonfunctioning tags removed, marked or replaced by operating tags. "Typical delivery format is one wide-web reel—typically between 3,000 to 10,000 pieces [inlays] per reel," says Terävä.

Raflatac's UHF inlays use its OneTenna UHF antenna. That, too, has been developed with flexibility in mind. Depending on the IC placement on the OneTenna short-dipole antenna, the company can manufacture the UHF RFID inlay to operate in the frequency ranges used in Europe (868-870 MHz), the United States (902-928 MHz) or Japan (950-956 MHz). Two additional IC placement positions on the antenna enable the finished inlay to operate while embedded in plastic, for either the European market or the U.S. one. Rafsec had also implemented its OneTenna design on other aluminum antenna models, as well as copper; however, not all of the Rafsec UHF tags and inlays use the OneTenna design.

Raflatac maintains that its OneTenna design helps lower the cost of producing RFID tags. In September, Rafsec priced its UHF Gen 1 and Gen 2 inlays at just under 10 U.S. cents apiece for a minimum purchase of 50,000 inlays. The company attributed the low cost to several factors: its OneTenna design, its inlay's high yield rate (on average, Raflatac claims, 98 percent of the inlays produced are fully operational) and the manufacturing flexibility of its recently opened production facility in Fletcher.

Moving under the control of Raflatac is just another change among many that the company has faced. "Rafsec has come full circle, but it was important—and a good business-building process—to be a standalone startup company for the first part of the decade, because the market required a new venture mentality," says Härkönen.

If the new Raflatac division is to achieve its goal of being a major producer of low-cost RFID inlays, its commitment to being nimble may yet prove invaluable. "We are very flexible. We also have a comprehensive product portfolio covering both UHF and HF, and we intend to keep our flexibility or agility as we continue to change and move forward," says Härkönen.