Place RFID Inside Your Product and Not on It
Place RFID Inside Your Product and Not on It
Embedding a transponder in consumer electronics delivers greater value with no change in the business process, and also the incremental cost is almost negligible.
Various companies even now see radio frequency as something that is used in a finished product to get better supply chain tracking. To these companies, technology is generally an extra cost that they fear they won't earn by recovering processes and improved managing inventory. Most of the companies have realised that RFID is not just a radio bar code but something that can be embedded inside a product at little additional cost, so that the product may be located throughout its lifecycle.
RFID technology providers have been working with several electronic firms to create RFID chips which can be embedded or put inside printed circuit boards (PCBs). There are various advantages to this method, as compared to sticking a label with an embedded transponder on a cell phone box, box containing DVD player or Internet router.
Firstly, tagging a box means one can only locate the product from the time it is packed until the time of sale. You can track the product from the time its manufacturing process starts till the time the item is recycled. Tracking work-in-progress may not have very big advantages, as most of the electronics facilities are highly programmed, with robots picking constituents and adding them to the PCB. But a producer can locate the finished products as they are entered into the inventory, check how long they remain in inventory and make sure the proper items are collected and transported to the right customers.
An advance shipping notice (ASN) could be sent by a manufacturer to its retail partner, enabling it to know the items that are on their way and their serial numbers. The retail associate can then collects the items into inventory, checks the serial numbers with the ASN and recognize which items got lost during the journey (A major problem in the electronics supply chain is theft). Telstra, an Australian telecommunications firm, in the recent past ran an RFID trial that, if rolled out through its 130 outlets, would accumulate the company around $3.2 million in annual product shrinkage and labor costs.
Consumers may be benefiting as well. For example, a database of owners could be created by a phone manufacturer so that when a phone goes missing, someone only requires to read its tag ID to locate the owner's address. Also the manufacturer could offer additional service, wherein a phone could be returned to the manufacturer, which would then be shipped back to the owner at no additional cost.
Tag in the phone's PCB might be useful for recycling even is it is time for the phone to be discarded. Countries where manufacturers are in charge for recycling electronics, an RFID tag could recognize the manufacturer. This could also be helpful in enabling a waste management firm for speedy information recovering about which parts can be recycled, as well as any dangerous materials the phone might have.
Embedding a transponder in an electronics product has a great advantage that the additional 10 cents or 20 cents for an RFID chip is then an unimportant item on a bill of materials that could amount to $10, $20, $50 or more. CEO Impinj, Bill Colleran, points out that the business process need not change (as it des with applying an RFID label). Robots mostly pick the constituents of a tape reel and puts them on the board, so the RFID chip would be just another thing to add to the PCB', he says. The process is not changed by this, it doesn't add much to the bill of materials and a lot of benefits are delivered. RFID becomes a no-brainer.'
Like other RFID companies, Impinj has been working with various electronics and microchip producers to create chips which can be added to PCBs. I got an opportunity to sit down with Alexander Schmoldt, a business development engineer at Murata Elektronik GmbH, while hosting our RFID Journal LIVE! Europe 2009 event a few weeks ago in Germany. A new RFID module, known as the Magicstrap, which constitutes a low-temperature co-fired ceramic substrate and an embedded RFID chip has been created by his company. The module can be put over or embedded in a PCB and, according to Murata, be read at a distance of 4 metres (16.4 feet) over the 800 Mhz to1,000 Mhz band. This means that a tag on a PCB can be used to locate the product through the supply chain to the retail store.
During my recent visit to NXP Semiconductor's Application and System Center in Graz, Australia, Martin Schatzmayer, head of the center, demonstrated to me a prototype of a chip which can be embedded in a PCB, and which could use as an antenna the ground plane. Though the product is not ready yet for commercialization, Schatzmayer feels NXP can make a design that will work on virtually any PCB.
There are mainly three options for adding RFID to PCBs says Iminj's Colleran. First is to place a chip on the board and connecting it to an antenna on the board during the process. Second is to embed the transponder in the board, and the third one is to have linkages from the chip to an antenna which is not part of the board.
There are pros and cons to every approach,' Colleran says. If the chip is put on the board, you are actually taking up valuable real estate. If you embed the transponder in the PCB, the constituents that go on it have a lot of metal and can block a signal from reaching the antenna, which affects performance. And connecting the chip to an antenna which is not on the board, a metal housing might block the signal.'
Electronics manufacturers would need to make a choice between one approach or another, depending on the product to be made, but Colleran feels achieving the 5 to 8 feet of read range required to track electronic products is possible. He also thinks that the initial products with RFID transponders on the circuit board will create waves in the market by the second half of the next year. Developing transponders that can be embedded in PCB might take longer time, but once RFID becomes just another component on a PCB, companies will grab at the chances to use it for tracking their electronic products throughout their lifetime.
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