Chipless RFID tag wins €2 million European Research Council Consolidator Grant

Etienne Perret, a faculty member at Grenoble Institute of Technology and a research scientist at LCIS, an FMNT lab based in Valence, has just won a €2 million European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his chipless RFID tags.

The grant will allow Perret to hire PhD candidates and post-docs and purchase antenna characterization equipment. The bar-code-sized tags are printed with conductive ink. The target properties and cost price are situated somewhere between barcode and conventional RFID tag technologies. The chipless tags have been in development for eight years and are protected by two patents.

Erasable, rewritable tags can be read at 30 cm

Because the tags can be read at distances of up to 30 cm—even through opaque objects—using an ultra-wideband technology, the physical appearance of the item tagged is not altered in any way. But the lab does not plan to stop there. The new features on the drawing board include totally erasable tags—an advantage for RFID, which is sometimes criticized for making it possible to monitor consumers. The tags will also be rewritable, something that barcodes cannot offer. And, by adding silicon nanowires, the tags will be able to serve as low-cost temperature and/or humidity sensors. Another, longer-term possibility will be the capacity to recognize movements or actions to serve as an interface between a user and a machine. A company interested in the tags is already working with the researchers. A startup has also been created to scale the technology up for manufacturing and commercialize the product.

Contact: etienne.perret@lcis.grenoble-inp.fr

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