Oricla project aims to make organic RFID tags meet industry standards

Dan Rogers - 12 Feb 2010

A new European project will bring organic RFID tags closer to current industry standards, following impressive gains in performance.

Belgian research group IMEC is leading a consortium including organic RFID developer PolyIC, the Holst Centre and Evonik on the Oricla project to overcome a number of obstacles that prohibit widespread adoption of organic RFID tags, such as standard interaction with industrial RFID readers.

Industry standards

The project is working to reach some of the EPC standards that support industry adoption of RFID.

Paul Heremans, programme manager for organic and oxide transistors at the Holst Centre, an R&D centre set up by IMEC and Dutch research organisation TNO, states: 'We're working with PolyIC to make some of the salient features of the EPC standards come through.'

The €4.7 million project will make organic tags synchronised to read the signals sent out by current readers.

'One element that is still missing from organic RFID tags is that a silicon tag reader usually sends out a signal that the tag must understand, so the tag's bit rate is synchronised with the electrical fields of the reader. In an organic tag it is synchronised with a clock though, so the reader is unable to read it.

'Also, if there are many tags in the field of operation, the reader's signal is silent to all but one, so we need the tag to listen to what the reader is saying.'

Demonstrators

IMEC and the Holst Centre recently presented dual gate organic tags with a data rate of 4.3kb per second at voltages of 10V. Having made progress in these areas, the Oricla project will make it easier for the tags to be adopted in industrial applications.

While 4.3kb per second is still low-level performance compared to inorganic RFID, it is sufficient for less demanding applications, including some anti-counterfeiting uses.

And Heremans believes that organic RFID could be in use in these areas before the project is completed in 2012.

He adds: 'PolyIC is already looking at applications and the first products that will come onto the market will be the simpler applications, such as ticketing and anti-counterfeiting applications.

'I sincerely hope we will see organic RFID in products before the end of this project'

+PE.com reported on PolyIC's intention to introduce organic RFID into tickets and cards to confirm authenticity in September 2009.

Heremans believes that the company is now ready to begin introducing the technology.

He says: 'PolyIC has the technology and has inline testing that is really quite impressive - I expect it will come pretty soon. If you look at the state of the technology, it looks pretty ready.'

And early, low-demand applications, in combination with tags more closely aligned to industry standards, could see wider acceptance in the mid-term.

Heremans comments: 'Further down the line, PolyIC sees really big markets for tags using EPC standards. However, they must show that they work first in lower demand applications.'