Avery Dennison Ramps Up Its RFID R&D

"This is increasingly important as the number of chip choices expands, and as customers develop more sophisticated applications," Cornick says. "We can develop and present a handful of options very quickly, instead of relying on a one-tag-fits-all approach." The division also continues to review, evolve and redirect resources for its R&D team, to ensure it has the proper balance of expertise, research and skills.

"For example," Cornick explains, "when reader technology is stable, we direct resources toward chip research. When the chip choices are stable and new readers hit the market, we make it our business to understand the set of new readers—such as how they interact with chips and tags—better than the individual reader companies do. We always have a significant portion of our engineering resources focused on developing and refining applications for customers."

The company's R&D organization is composed of three main units: The ATC team focuses on applications—that is, the use of RFID in a specific instance to solve a particular business need—and testing; a team in the United Kingdom concentrates on antenna design, tags and interrogators; and a group in Avery Dennison's production facility in Clinton, S.C., develops and supports the company's own manufacturing processes, along with those of the label converters with which it works. The company declines to disclose budgets or staff size, but Cornick says the largest engineering team is the one in Atlanta.

Avery Dennison's clients can leverage the ATC to analyze their RFID applications and determine the best tags and other equipment for the job. What's more, the center helps customers quantify and articulate the issues and tradeoffs involved in an RFID application so they can make informed choices. According to Cornick, the ATC is an objective source of information regarding the components of an RFID system, including readers, antennas and inlay packaging.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution," Cornick says. "We make it our business to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different reader choices, articulate the strengths and weaknesses of different tag designs and offer objective, analytic data to customers to help them make the right choice to optimize the performance of their application."

Companies such as Monsanto, a multinational provider of bioengineered agricultural products, employed the ATC to help select the hardware and software it utilized during its RFID trial. Last year, the company evaluated the use of passive RFID tags to identify individual seed packets as they were shipped from its Middleton, Wis., facility to its network of test farms, where new, genetically engineered seed is tested (see Monsanto Hopes to Sow Benefits by Tagging Seed Packets).