Printable Electronics
Xerox has announced that they have developed a procedure to print with “low-temperature” silver ink using ink-jet technology on a variety of surfaces. What makes this new technique so different and promising is that existing techniques required high temperatures, which would melt materials such as plastics, and/or a so-called “clean room” environment. This new development requires neither.
This is the sort of breakthrough that the RFID industry has been waiting for. With this, it becomes practical to print RFID tags on everything, as costs have been dramatically lowered. According to PC Mag, Xerox claims that this could bring costs for RFID tags down from where they are at about a dollar (US) or so, down to roughly a penny each. In the research I’ve done on RFID in the past, this sort of drop has been seen as critical in the development of item-level tagging.
If this really takes off (and I do believe it will), this could cause alot of changes in retail. Everything from better inventory management due to “smart shelves” that can tell how much/how many of an item still remains on them, to effortless checkout, where you just push your cart through a reader and it rings up all your items at once. Videos after the jump.
Below are a couple of videos from Xerox. It seems that Xerox mixed up the descriptions of these videos when they posted them to Youtube, however, so I’ve swapped them. ;)
Description from Youtube: “Xerox researcher Paul Smith explains how melting temperature was lowered for new silver conductive ink for printing flexible circuitry.”
Description from Youtube: “Paul Smith, laboratory manager of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada, provides a tour of his lab, explaining the different components of printable electronics.”
This video is an exammple of what I’m talking about when it comes to “effortless checkout,” where you just push your cart through a reader. Of note is of course that this will not eliminate all manual checkout, as exemplified by the old man in the video standing in line waiting for checkout. He has what looks like a bottle of wine in his hands, which is alcohol, so would probably have to be checked out manually, as a checker would have to verify his ID (or at least see that he’s old enough, depending on the local laws and store policies).
Source: “Xerox Scientists Develop “Silver Bullet” Needed to Replace Silicon Circuits with Low-Cost, Durable Plastic” (Xerox Newsroom, press release), discovered via “Xerox Claims Printable Electronics Breakthrough” (PC Mag)
Tags: printable electronics, RFID
