Tageos Makes RFID Labels on Paper, Eliminating Plastic Substrate

Mar. 14, 2010—Four years after French passive RFID hardware manufacturer Tageos was launched to develop a printable EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID label made without a plastic inlay—thereby reducing the cost and environmental impact of traditional tags—the company is now ready to market the results of those efforts. Rolls of the labels, designed to be low-cost and sustainable, are expected to become commercially available next month, either wet (backed with a pressure-sensitive adhesive) or dry (sans adhesive). The company intends to display these labels at RFID Journal LIVE! 2011, to be held on Apr. 12-14, in Orlando, Fla.

Tageos, headquartered in Montpellier, France, was founded in 2007 with $1.3 million of research and development money, to develop a new process for label manufacturing that the company predicts will reduce label prices by 10 to 30 percent—which, it believes, will encourage the adoption of RFID technology. RFID labels currently on the market are produced by taking a plain paper label and converting it by embedding an RFID inlay created on a separate plastic substrate. The RFID tag in a Tageos label, however, is created directly on the label itself, and thus has no plastic substrate and less adhesive, since there are no layers to glue together. The tag also has significantly thinner antennas, composed of a smaller amount of metal. According to Tageos, the tag's read range will meet the needs of both logistics and item-level applications, though the company does not indicate the actual read ranges that users can expect. More...

03-16-2011 17:24