Oct 07, 2020Internet of Things (IoT) technology company Talkin' Things has released an RFID tag priced at between 3 and 4 cents apiece, which it says will be incorporated into fast-moving consumer goods, food and pharmaceutical packaging. The company promoted the new tags during the recent RFID Journal Virtually LIVE! conference and exhibition. Talkin' Things estimates the new price to be about 40 percent less than the cost of existing RFID tags, and the tags are designed to be incorporated into product packaging for which RFID traditionally has been too expensive.
The new family of tags, which are being shipped in sample quantities, includes a UHF RFID tag priced at 2.7 cents, an HF 13.56 MHz tag compliant with the ISO 15693 standard that costs 4 cents and an NFC 13.56 MHz RFID tag compliant with ISO 14443 that costs 3 cents. The products are offered in the form of wet inlays with adhesive backing, though customers could request dry inlay versions as well. Talkin' Things will produce the tags at its production facility in Warsaw, Poland.
Talkin' Things' new 3-cent RFID tag
Typically, RFID tags cost 5 cents or more apiece. By reducing that price, the company says it enables the technology's use in ways that have previously been out of reach, simply because the use of tags in high volume becomes expensive; even pennies add up when tags are deployed in quantities of hundreds of thousands, or millions. The targeted application is to track high-volume, lower-value products that have not been tagged at the item level in the past. The company predicts the new tags will enable IoT-based smart packaging, says Jakub Zaluska, Talkin' Things' marketing director, so that connected products can capture and transmit data throughout the supply chain and to consumers.
The company is producing the tags now, and it has begun shipping them out in samples, with large volumes expected to be accommodated in the near future. "We have the samples produced, and they are going to clients now," Zaluska says, specifying manufacturers, as well as packaging and label companies. By offering three versions of RFID tags, Talkin' Things aims to provide solutions throughout a product's life cycle, thereby serving a variety of applications. UHF and HF 13.56 MHz tags can be used for logistics and supply chain management, while the NFC tags enable consumer engagement since users can access data via their NFC-enabled mobile phones.
However, the company draws a distinction when it comes to the value of a low-cost tag. "We're not just supplying tags that are cheaper," Zaluska notes. "We provide benefits of smart packaging available for FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] and pharmaceutical products," to make it economically feasible to implement intelligence into every unit of a product. "Our mission is to make smart packaging benefits available for all products." The company is currently working with packaging firms to ensure that the process of incorporating the RFID tags into their products is not disruptive and will not add to production costs or jeopardize product integrity.
Companies can initially use the tags in a variety of ways. They can be built into boxes or other packaging, or into product labels (including those on bottles of wine), or into containers of medicine. For instance, HF tags offer the benefit of being readable by many smartphone models, while also transmitting data for logistics purposes, due to HF's reliability around liquids and functionality for consumers. Pharmaceutical companies can use such a system to identify each container of a drug or other product as it moves through bottling, packing and shipping.
Traditionally, some drug companies have used 2D barcodes to uniquely identify every product. During packaging, processing and shipping, goods are identified by the scanning of their barcodes. If something that is packed in boxes needs to be located prior to shipment, it can take many hours to locate. With RFID, the same process could be accomplished within a matter of seconds. Food and other FMCG products have leveraged RFID in large volumes because of the cost of tagging those goods. However, with UHF or HF RFID tags incorporated into packaging, each item can be uniquely identified whether it is at the manufacturing site, in a warehouse or on a retailer's shelf.
If an NFC tag is employed, consumers can tap the tag with their phone to access food-safety information, ingredients, a product's origins and other data. Some companies are deploying multiple tags in their packaging—for instance, NFC for use by consumers, or UHF for supply chain tracking. Talkin' Things has been working toward this goal since the company was founded, Zaluska says.
Talkin' Things' Jakub Zaluska
"Everything we've done through our six years has been a road to achieve this," Zaluska states. The firm looked at not only the tag antenna's design, but also the process of manufacturing the labels. "We analyzed the whole tag-production process" and optimized that, he says. As part of that process, Talkin' Things opened its new production facility this year to include new, high-capacity machines. The company also operates an RFID lab where the tags are designed and optimized to lower cost while achieving high performance. "We design them to never compromise the performance."
Talkin' Things' antennas are connected to ICs provided by STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors. The UHF inlay measure 73 millimeters by 15 millimeters (3 inches by 0.6 inch), while the HF ISO 15693 and NFC inlays each measure 23 millimeters by 17 millimeters (1 inch by 0.7 inch).
The new production facility has a current capacity of 170 million tags per year, Zaluska says, but Talkin' Things has committed to increasing that capacity during the coming months. The company is selling the tags to both brands and packaging companies, and it partners with packaging companies as well. It works with businesses such as Multi-color Corp. (MCC) to ensure the tag application can be incorporated into existing production processes. In addition, Talkin' Things can provide entire RFID systems, including readers and software to run industrial hardware, and to be integrated with a user's existing management software.
"We're a one-stop shop," Zaluska says, "if a client needs a solution based on RFID." The company designs and builds readers customized to accommodate the existing conditions on its customers' packaging lines. "We build hardware even from scratch to provide the best performance for their environment." Pilots of the new packaging tags are presently under way in Europe, the United States and Australia, Talkin' Things reports.
