- Tageos brought a message of sustainability, new engineering and partnerships to RFID Journal LIVE in Las Vegas last week.
- The company has launched offerings to help companies engineer solutions for unique use cases.
Updating antenna designs and material substrates, Tageos is providing new products aimed at a more sustainable solution for companies tracking goods and assets with RFID.
The company is responding to increased demand from companies and consumers for greater sustainability in the products they use. For Tageos, that means taking responsibility for making its RFID inlays and tags more environmentally friendly.
In fact, according to Karin Fabri, Tageos’ chief marketing officer, the company sees the demand for “truly sustainable RFID products” to increase further over time. Internally the company conducted a company-wide carbon footprint analysis and is implementing a NetZero goal for 2050.
In the meantime, it has released what it calls its EOS Zero RAIN RFID inlay family made of Forest Stewardship Council- (FSC) certified recyclable paper instead of the standard plastic used in most such products. Like their PET siblings, the EOS Zero antennas are free of heavy metals or other harmful materials, according to Fabri.
Tageos has been innovating its RFID antenna designs based on the latest IC technologies as well, leveraging the recently released chips from NXP, Impinj, and STMicroelectronics.
New RFID Inlay Product
The EOS-202 U9XE leverages NXP’s UCODE 9 ICs with a small footprint with high performance for most types of healthcare, personal care and consumer electronics items. A compact inlay with a footprint of 20 by 10 millimeters, it works well on medications including glass syringes, liquid glass vials and blow-fill-seal vials as well as having extra memory to aid in hospital, pharmacy and inventory management workflows.
For a high performance tag targeting retail, the EOS-261 M830 is based on the Impinj M800 IC series. The tag is designed for high sensitivity and comes with high versatility in a small form factor. The EOS-261 M830 is now available in paper-face, delivery format and FSC certification.
Aiming at tamper detection NFC functionality, the company’s EOS-920 TT incorporates STMicroelectronics’ advanced ST25TV-C chips and offers brand owners and retailers a versatile tag that provides tamper-evidence. In that way users can enable brand protection and product authentication applications.
Hector Gomez, Tageos’s NFC business development VP, said it makes it ideal for food and beverages, customer experience and smart packaging applications.
Bringing Sustainability Messaging to RFID Journal LIVE!
Another new label in the company’s portfolio is the EOS-300 U9 Zero Max that was built to provide both sustainability and high performance for industrial manufacturing, logistics and non-food retail. In fact, the UHF RFID tag provides the same quality level of its sibling tag — the EOS-300 U9 — for retail labeling and logistics packaging. But this product is paper-based, for a lower carbon-footprint.
Tageos is furthering its commitment to sustainability through education and messaging. At RFID Journal LIVE!, Tageos’ Michael Baucke, director of market development, presented on the subject of “How to Choose RFID Inlay Technology for Sustainable Supply Chains.”
The company also brought partners to the RFID Journal LIVE conference—customer engagement technology company Proqure displayed its digital product authentication and enhanced consumer experiences for high-value consumer goods, known as “Phygital Infrastructure,” based on Tageos NFC tags.
Strain Sensor Solutions
Sensor solutions company SensThys demonstrated its real-time weight measurement of granular materials with passive RAIN RFID sensors for mechanical strain applications. The technology can be used for load bearing equipment to detect changes in strain, such as with wind turbine blades. Together with Tageos, SensThys provides Tageos’ RFID passive RFID sensor tags for a broad range of measurement applications across various industries.
Additionally, digital warehouse and supply chain management company Trilliott was in Las Vegas to highlight how healthcare inventory and asset management systems can enable inventory and asset management with RAIN RFID inlays from Tageos.
Trilliot’s SmartSITE platform includes asset management such as tracking hospital inventory as well as furniture, said Trilliot’s CEO Booth Kalmbach. As a software-as-a-service, SmartSITE can digitize a hospital’s supply chain and warehouse.
New Engineering Initiative
Tageos officials have renewed their focus on expanding the company’s offerings as well, based on the needs of its increasingly diverse customers.
Case in point, Tageos launched an engineering as a service offering to provide more custom products tailored to the requirements of a widening set of end users. “We will be designing the next generation of products,” said Fabri, that may include sensors, innovative software and emerging technology.
The tags and solutions will be aimed beyond apparel retail to cosmetics and consumer electronics, among other merchandise. The group will also engineer technology for sectors such as healthcare and manufacturing, Fabri added.
Specialty products could accommodate a wider set of goods and assets for tagging including dishes, leather furniture and other items that have not traditionally been tagged with RFID, or that aesthetically require a specialized, unobtrusive but high-performance tag.
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