Printing Cheap NFC Powered Tags

Category: Science & Technology
Posted: August 14, 2012 03:42AM
Author: Guest_Jim_*

A fairly common app for smartphones is a barcode or QR code reader so that consumers can quickly get information on a product or automatically visit a website, by just taking a picture. Now researchers at Sunchon National University and Paru Printed Electronics Research Institute, as reported by the Institute of Physics, have designed a cheap NFC device that offers even more than these codes.

By combining a rectifier and an antenna into a "rectenna," the device can be powered by the radio waves emitted by a smartphone's NFC system. Instead of taking a picture of a QR code, this would allow you to just pass your phone over something and be given whatever information you are looking for. By connecting the rectenna to a chip though, it may actually provide the information directly to your phone, instead of making it go online to find it.

Importantly the rectenna is also very cheap to produce using a roll-to-roll method at just one cent per unit. Also this manufacturing method may allow it to be incorporated into a variety of things such as price tags, logos, and signage.

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