Printed Radio Chips Successful in Field Testing

Admission tickets, travel tickets and security documents, such as the passport booklet or driving licence: All of these areas are promising fields of application for printed radio chips, so-called “Printed Smart RFID Labels.” This was the outcome of the PRISMA research project in which Bundesdruckerei participated over the past three years.

“What’s new is that fully-printed radio-frequency ID chips can be produced thanks to polymer electronics,” explained Dr. Oliver Muth from Bundesdruckerei’s project team. “These RFID chips provide us with extremely thin, flexible and low-cost storage media which can be used in a vast number of ways.” This makes printed radio chips an interesting option for areas where the use of conventional RFID chips was up to now either too expensive or not feasible for material reasons.

Within the scope of PRISMA, the project partners, backed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), developed complete systems to test the new memory medium: from the adaptation of the chip to the respective requirements to reading devices and testing in different everyday scenarios, such as ticketing, municipal public transport and security. The largest field test was carried out at Media-Tech Expo 2008 in Frankfurt am Main, where more than 4,000 tickets were fitted with printed radio chips.

Bundesdruckerei also used this new process, for instance, for admission tickets to “The Long Night of the Sciences 2008” in Berlin. As a specialist for ID security, the company, however, focused its activities strongly on security documents. The project team was able to print high security cards, similar to the EU driving licence card, with RFID chips. Using this new technology, the team paid particular attention to the advantages offered by the new technology in terms of improved production times and higher security standards.

“We are proud that within the scope of PRISMA we managed to integrate fully printed RFID chips for the first time into security documents,” explainedMuth. “Both the chips as well as the required materials and processes must be developed further before they can be fully integrated into optimised access control or demanding ID security systems.”

The project coordinator was PolyIC GmbH & Co. KG, and project partners are PolyIC GmbH & Co. KG; Leonhard Kurz GmbH; Siemens AG; Bundesdruckerei GmbH; Bartsch GmbH; Höft & Wessel AG, Technische Universität München