Key Takeaways
- Energy, not features, is the main barrier stopping RFID tags from moving beyond simple identification into sensing, geolocation and active connectivity.
- Dracula Technologies’ OPV technology generates power from light levels as low as 5 lux, and pairing it with RF harvesting can push detection accuracy past the 94% threshold large logistics players now require.
Passive RFID has powered billions of tags for one job: identification. The moment you ask a tag to sense, locate or transmit on its own, the model breaks.
Energy harvesting is the bridge across that gap. Organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology converts ambient light, natural or artificial, direct or indirect, into usable power for low-power electronics, and it works in genuinely dim conditions where other sources fail. That capability is already moving from lab to shipping product. Dracula Technologies’ work with Paragon ID on the XgenTag-L forced its LAYER modules to guarantee energy at light levels as low as 20 to 25 lux in a reduced area.
Its partnership with Linxens covers R&D, production, commercial and marketing activity, and has already produced light-powered tracker samples backed by an Android app and a cloud platform for monitoring. Together, these efforts position OPV as the link between billions of low-cost identification tags and the more complex, connected devices the market wants next.
Jérôme Vernet is VP of Strategy and Co-Founder of Dracula Technologies, where he drives the company’s commercial strategy and international growth after joining in its early startup stage. An entrepreneur with more than two decades in industrial technology, automation and international business development, Vernet sat down with us to detail how LAYER OPV technology captures indoor light and generates power, how a hybrid approach pairing OPV with RF harvesting improves detection reliability where neither source alone is dependable, and what has to shift commercially, in pricing and customer mindset, before feature-rich connected tags can compete with the economics of passive RFID at scale.
RFIDJournal.com: Passive RFID has powered billions of low-cost tags for simple identification, but it hits a wall the moment you add sensing, geolocation or active connectivity. From where you sit, what’s the single biggest barrier holding the industry back from that next step?
Jérôme Vernet: Energy is the biggest barrier. We now have active tags incorporating many more features than simple identification, but these functions and the transmission of data require power. Energy is therefore a fundamental challenge when moving toward smarter, more connected tags.
It is also the main limitation for deploying new sensors and IoT applications at scale. Battery-powered devices are often unacceptable or unrealistic for mass deployment. Energy-harvesting solutions can therefore enable new uses that would otherwise be difficult to deploy.
RFIDJournal.com: Disposable batteries can supply the extra energy these smarter tags need, but they bring real trade-offs in lifetime, cost, weight and sustainability. Which of those trade-offs do you think the market underestimates most, and why?
Vernet: I would say total cost of ownership (TCO). Beyond the cost of the hardware itself, and the cost of its replacement, the main issue is the potential loss of the data these devices are designed to provide. When there is no energy, data cannot be transmitted, which impacts the overall process. Providing that data is their fundamental purpose.
Sustainability is also an increasingly important consideration, but solutions first need to be cost-effective.
How LAYER OPV Technology Turns Ambient Light Into Power
RFIDJournal.com: Walk us through how your LAYER technology actually captures ambient indoor light and turns it into usable power. What kind of light levels does a device need before OPV harvesting becomes practical?
Vernet: LAYER converts available ambient light, including natural or artificial, direct or indirect light, into electricity. At a technical level, its organic photovoltaic active layer absorbs photons and generates electrical charges. These charges are separated and collected by the electrodes, producing an electrical current that can power low-power electronic devices.
Our OPV technology is designed for low-light conditions, with LAYER® designed to generate energy from light levels starting from 5 lux. And everywhere you have humans, you have light.
RFIDJournal.com: RF dead zones and insufficient light are the obvious failure points for any harvesting-based tag. How do you design for environments where neither source is reliable, and how do you set customer expectations around that?
Vernet: Combining different energy-harvesting sources is an emerging approach to addressing these challenges. At Dracula Technologies, we have created our own Tech Center, a team of senior engineers that can support customers from A to Z in designing a power solution based on their specific needs and operating scenarios.
This can range from a single OPV module to a more complex design involving RF harvesting with Energous or Powercast, as well as power-management ICs (PMICs), such as those developed by e-peas, and storage elements such as supercapacitors or rechargeable batteries.
To evaluate a customer’s environment, we have several options. First, the customer can provide the relevant data through our questionnaire, which we then use for simulations.
Second, we can rent a lux meter to the customer, who can use it to measure light intensity in various scenarios and share the data with us. Third, the customer can use our LMS (Light Monitoring System), a device we developed that collects and transmits information about light intensity, duration and other relevant parameters.
All of this data is used to properly size the OPV module based on the electrical characteristics of the customer’s use case, including the power budget and duty cycle. Once we cross-reference the light environment with the power budget, we can properly size the OPV module needed to fulfill the customer’s application.
Our approach is application-driven: no oversizing and no forcing the solution. We help customers think about their real needs based on actual usage. Assumptions need to be realistic, including light intensity, duration and duty cycle. Quite often, we help customers redefine their specifications. Using energy harvesting is always a trade-off. With limited energy available, the question is how to optimize its use.
Why Combining OPV and RF Harvesting Improves Detection Reliability
RFIDJournal.com: You’ve talked about combining energy sources, pairing RF harvesting with OPV and a small rechargeable storage element. What problem does that hybrid approach solve that no single source can?
Vernet: In logistics and warehouse environments, RF infrastructure is already deployed in many cases, but some limitations remain.
Combining different energy sources can improve the overall energy yield and the reliability and accuracy of detection. You do not need to rely on a single source, but on two. In the applications we are targeting, these sources are quite often, not to say always, present. RF in logistics is spread everywhere, and you always have light, even dim light, wherever you have humans.
Some large players are setting a 94% detection as the minimum acceptable level, so even a 2-3% improvement in overall accuracy can be significant. This is one of the benefits that combining energy- harvesting sources can unlock.
RFIDJournal.com: Your work with Paragon ID on the XgenTag-L is one of the clearest examples of a battery-free smart label in the wild. What did that collaboration teach you about moving OPV from the lab into a shipping product?
Vernet: It taught us many things, but the biggest insights came from moving from a well-known environment into a completely unknown one, where every application, usage and scenario can be different.
This pushed us to conduct additional testing and confirm that our products remain functional in genuinely challenging environments. It also demonstrated the versatility of our technology across multiple use cases. Considering photovoltaic harvesting, the range can extend from 1 lux up to 100,000 lux. With OPV, we are particularly relevant in real low-light conditions, below 50 lux.
Working on the XgenTag-L with Paragon ID forced us to guarantee available energy at light levels as low as 20–25 lux, with a reduced area. This meant ensuring that the power density of LAYER could achieve the required performance. And this is exactly what we demonstrated.
RFIDJournal.com: Tell us about the Linxens partnership. What functions does removing the disposable battery unlock in a smart label that customers couldn’t get before?
Vernet: It is less about unlocking specific functions than about enabling new uses and applications where a disposable battery-powered solution could not realistically be considered.
When you are talking about millions of devices distributed around the world, there is no practical way to retrieve individual devices to replace their batteries. Once the battery is depleted, such products may be lost or scrapped.
The partnership covers R&D, production, technical, commercial, and marcom activities. Based on Linxens‘ core business, the main applications are smart labels and trackers for mass-scale deployment. Linxens has expertise in inlay production and in integrating components into electronic boards and circuits for mass production.
For years, with their customers, they have worked on applications using disposable batteries. But between customers’ willingness to eliminate batteries as part of strategic management decisions, market demand for such solutions, and the need to address applications where batteries are not viable, it became quite clear that energy harvesting is the answer, using available technologies including light, RF, vibration and thermal energy.
Recently, Linxens released its first light-powered samples using our LAYER modules. They also developed an Android app to visualize their trackers and deployed a cloud platform to locate and monitor customer trackers.
How a Power Budget Redefines What a Connected Tag Can Do
RFIDJournal.com: When a device relies on harvested energy rather than a battery, the power budget becomes the constraint that shapes everything. How does that change the way you and your partners think about what a connected tag can and can’t do?
Vernet: It requires quite a big change in approach.
Instead of going bigger and bigger in battery size, we focus on the necessary and realistic features that can be supported by the available energy. The Dracula Technologies Tech Center can demonstrate this quickly once we establish the power budget. Quite often, roughly always, an electronic redesign is necessary to optimize the system around that power budget.
For example, when a customer has a battery-powered device using a 100 mA storage element, they start with that amount of energy. Using energy harvesting changes the paradigm. We start from the power budget and the duty cycle; we don’t “care” about the energy source.
It’s similar to a car: the size of the fuel tank alone doesn’t tell you how far the car can go. You also need to consider how the car is used — for example, long distances, short trips, or an environment where fuel stations are few and far between.
We generate energy continuously, although at different levels. The trick is to understand the minimum energy needed to operate a cycle and how many cycles are required per day. Once this is known, we can properly size the OPV in terms of the number of cells required, for voltage, and the size of the cells required, for current, generating only the necessary amount of energy.
RFIDJournal.com: Beyond the technology itself, what has to change commercially, in pricing, supply chains or customer mindset, before feature-rich connected tags can compete with the economics of passive RFID at scale?
Vernet: Pricing is one of the main topics, but we also need to compare apples with apples. It took decades for RFID tags to reach volumes in the billions and prices in the cents. We are still at the beginning of this market, while RFID will continue to exist and grow.
Energy harvesting is creating a bridge between billions of ultra-basic, low-cost identification tags and hundreds of thousands of complex, bulky IoT devices. People are used to cheap RFID tags and disposable batteries. Even if energy-harvesting solutions are more expensive, they address different uses and enable new applications.
We are also still at the beginning of this story. Many improvements are on the way in processes, materials and volumes, which will make these solutions more cost-effective. There is nothing specific that needs to change or adapt in supply chains.
As for customer mindset, I would not say that anything specific needs to change. Customers are looking for a result or an output. Our job is to offer the proper answer and the best solution available.
Data is key, and AI is becoming the main way to manage that data. AI is extremely powerful and relevant when it has data to process. To have data available, the first step is to have reliable hardware that can generate that data. When it comes to AI, without reliable hardware, you can’t go very far.
RFIDJournal.com: Look ahead five years. Where do you expect autonomous, self-powered connected tags to gain traction first, and what will it take for Dracula Technologies to lead that shift?
Vernet: I believe the timeframe for asset tracking and smart tags to take off will be shorter than five years. The traction is already there, with many players, including some of the largest companies, entering the market.
For us, the next step is to move from an individual energy harvester, such as OPV, toward an integrated “energy brick” combining the different elements in one solution.
We are part of the printed electronics industry. We already know how to print the harvester with our OPV LAYER technology, and the storage element with our supercapacitor, LAYER VAULT, and we are working on printing sensors. Having established the Dracula Technologies Tech Center also gives us a clear understanding and know-how in powering autonomous, low-power electronics.
The main markets are logistics, retail, supply chain and healthcare. We expect traction to develop first in logistics and supply-chain asset tracking, as well as industrial and warehouse environments.
RFIDJournal.com: Final open question: If there is a subject that I did not bring up that you wish to expand on, please feel free to do so.
Vernet: Energy harvesting is not about replacing RFID, but about extending what can be done beyond basic identification. It provides a bridge between traditional low-cost identification and more autonomous, connected IoT devices by removing the battery as a major constraint on deployment, maintenance and scale.
Related Stories