Chipless RFID — The End Game By Raghu Das, IDTechEx

RFID is a powerful enabling technology with ever widening application. However, potentially the largest applications of RFID such as consumer packaged goods, postal items, drugs and books can only be fully addressed if tag prices drop to under one cent including fitting them in place. There are many paybacks from doing this but, even taken together, they do not justify more. These largest applications offer potential sales of ten trillion tags yearly but silicon chips will always be too expensive to form the basis of more than a tiny proportion of such tags. Even without the expense of a silicon chip, a fitted cost means that, like 95% of barcodes today, the majority of highest volume RFID tags must be applied directly to products and packaging to achieve a fitted cost of well under one cent. A totally new report based on new research by IDTechEx analyses the situation. It is called Chipless RFID Forecasts, Technologies & Players 2006-2016 from www.idtechex.com.

RFID tags that do not contain a silicon chip are called chipless tags. The primary potential benefit of the most promising chipless tags is that eventually they could be printed directly on products and packaging for 0.1 cents and replace ten trillion barcodes yearly with something far more versatile and reliable.

The mainstream types of chipless tags are digitally encoded and work at more than one millimetre range, like silicon chips. Their potential markets go beyond the lowest cost – highest volume potential markets because they have other attributes beyond cost. Indeed today they are sold for higher price than silicon chip tags in some cases and lower cost in others. That will continue to be the case. Unique signature, analogue artefacts such as the magnetically encoded stripe in a banknote or microwave reflecting fibres in security paper can be sensed at one millimetre away and therefore just about fit into our definition of RFID but they have little application beyond anti-counterfeiting. We therefore discuss them only briefly in this report and we omit them from our statistics.