- Hana RFID, Goodyear and Michelin have been working together on a variety of UHF RFID tire tags—including link-less antennas—that uniquely and digitally identify tires on commercial vehicles
- With a focus on offering versatile options for different tire brands, styles and use cases, Hana RFID has released its new flexible RFID IC and is preparing for sensor-based tracking
Tires aren’t intended to last forever as they are exposed to heat, cold, pressure, cuts and punctures. As a car’s tires age, they undergo physical and chemical changes. And for the past two decades, tire manufacturers and RFID companies have been injecting relatively sensitive mechanical devices into this environment to track those changes.
The question has been how robust are the tags and will they compromise the tires at all? Development and testing found the technology has not impacted the integrity of the tire itself and can sustain up to a 1 million kilometer life of some commercial tires.
IoT firm Hana RFID has been part of that effort since the early days. Over the past 20-plus years, Hana has offered new products with a goal to provide flexibility to the automotive and tire industries as they are poised for growth into passenger vehicle tires.
New Offering from Hana RFID
Early on, there was little awareness as to whether RFID tagging of tires would even work. When tire manufacturers began embedding RFID tags into the sidewalls of their products, they needed to test whether the tags could sustain the heat and pressure of the vulcanization process. They then needed to see if the tag could hold up throughout the rigors a tire is exposed to in its life, all the way to recycling.
Goodyear worked with Hana RFID to embed RFID chips in NASCAR racing tires, followed by RFID tags in bus and commercial vehicles, and even large tires for mining trucks.
Recently, Hana RFID has been working with technology partners on the development and manufacturing of what is known as the Linkless Tag. The Linkless Tag IC solves problems some tire companies face, related to flexibility, as it is easier to fit into a tire, said Val Peters, Hana RFID’s branding and business strategist.
Now Hana is launching its new, more IC packaging options, enabling the embedding of a wide variety of chips, including Impinj, Monza and NXP UCODE series, that allows freedom of choice for their customers inside its coil antenna.
Two Decades on the Race Tracks
Hana RFID helped pioneer embeddable RFID tire tagging in motorsports, which evolved into commercial applications, said Peters. Hana’s differentiation comes from its roots in microelectronics, not traditional inlay production. The company makes spring coils that serve in tires as antennas (and provide flexibility to bend with the tire), based on the company’s history in watch production.
While the initial impetus was for RFID in tires was tracking inventory, the first high-profile application was in NASCAR races to support a new tire leasing model in which the manufacturer provided teams with a set number of tires per race weekend. They used RFID tags to track those tires to prevent any teams from gaining an unfair advantage by stockpiling tires.
Michelin contracted with Hana RFID in 2012 for RFID tags embedded in bus tires during the London Olympics. Around the same time, Goodyear and Michelin started using the tags in other racing and truck applications.
“As the demand for tire traceability and quality pedigree rose, some of the first real-world applications of our embeddable tire tags emerged in the high-performance world of racing—where precision, reliability, and data-driven insights make all the difference,” said John Erdmann, CEO of Hana Technologies. “Since 2006, our technology has been used in NASCAR, followed by the British Touring Car Championship in 2008, Formula E in 2014, MotoGP in 2016, and other elite racing categories.”
Tracking Tires for Sustainability
The tire industry has recognized the value of embeddable tire tags as a data carrier for the Digital Product Passport (DPP), the EU’s pending mandate to track a product from production to recycling. In 2019, the international standard ISO 20910 formalized general requirements and data structure for coding RFID tire tags. This standard delivers a common tag numbering and identifier system that all tire manufacturers can use, paving the way for more universal expansion.
Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear, and Pirelli together founded the Global Data Service Organization for Tires and Automotive Components (GDSO) in early 2022. The organization’s goal is to digitally standardize tire data and provide a common platform for all tire manufacturers to access and exchange data.
In the late 2010s, Volvo became the first vehicle manufacturer to require RFID in tires on their cars and trucks, to optimize the manufacturing processes. These tires were supplied by multiple tire brands (with Hana RFID tags).
Direct Attached and Linkless Tags
One product already in use is the Direct Attach version, which consists of a PCB board wired to an antenna. Some companies began looking for something that would be more flexible in the changing embedding practices. The goal was to remove mechanical connections for increased durability while creating a flatter response curve to allow for a “one tag fits all” approach, Peters said.
So by 2017, Hana started working on the Linkless tag, co-developed at Michelin’s request.
With the Linkless Tag, the spring acts as antenna and contains an IC that floats in the center of the spring. The small PCB board uses electronic coupling due to the proximity of the RF signal to connect to the antenna. For the Linkless Tag, with no direct attachment to the antenna, there is less risk of breaking.
However, long-term industry experience finds that customized implementations often provided better performance, leading tire manufacturers to continue to use the Direct Attached tag, Peters noted. “Hana remains committed to working closely with manufacturers to develop optimal solutions rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach,” he said.
Peters commented that with the production of embeddable RFID technology, new tag makers are entering the tire tracking market. Hana is supporting those brands entering the market, he added, allowing it to develop into a standard.
Over 250 Million Tires Tagged to Date
Industry experts see a future to consisting of customized or variable solutions that tire manufacturers can pick and choose from. Each company will be able to consider what will have the best performance inside of their tire because every tire has different type of compound, including steel reinforcement of the tire itself—steel can compromise the performance for RFID transmissions.
While the Linkless Tag is not built for additional sensing technology, the Direct Attached tag can accomplish features like temperature tracking. “You need to have a direct connection to connect temperature sensing or other features,” he said. The technology company is now testing temperature sensing with Goodyear.
Both the Direct Attached and the Linkless tags are in use today, with the tech company providing over 250 million tire tags thus far. Peters noted “we never heard about an electronic failure due to breakage of the tag. It’s just never happened.”
RFID Chip Options
Furthermore, tire companies may have need for a choice of available memory. “We need to listen to our existing customers—we get the questions out of the market, we will want to offer more options and that’s why we released our own IC packaging options,” Peter said, that can incorporate a variety of ICs.
In the long term, RFID can be used to bring a view into the entire ecosystem of tires—from production to sales to storage, retreading and recycling. Tire companies predict that passenger vehicles will be the focus for technology embedding in tires, driven in part by the the European DPP legislation creating a digital record for products, including tires.
Much of the engineering technical work is past now, such as testing how robust the tags can be when being built into a tire and then operating in the real world. For every tire manufacturer, the first incentive is to boost safety, so systems that track conditions of tires may be on the horizon to detect if a tire is too hot or is experiencing high strain.
“Everything that will improve safety has the attention of tire manufacturing,” Peters pointed out. So specialty sensing tags may be in the works.
Increased Production Capacity
Additionally, tags with sensing technology, used in specific industries, are likely to emerge as well. “We’re looking at the very, very big tires for the mining industry for example,” said Peters. The tags can detect and transmit safety-related issues while the heavy vehicles are outside of the mine so that any problems can be identified and corrected before the vehicles drive underground.
“We’ve come such a long way as an industry in making [tire tracking] possible, but at the end of the day we’re still at the beginning. We’re expecting to see a huge win for the RFID industry” by identifying all the billions of tires in operation around the world, he noted.
Hana has been the primary supplier of embeddable tire tags for all major tire brands for over 20 years, Peters said, but that is no longer the case. With the production of tags by newcomers expected to enter the market in mid-2025, “with the market becoming more mature, Hana is supporting those brands entering the market, allowing it to develop into a standard.”