The Revolution With Printed Electronics Begins

The market for printed electronics is open: PolyIC has realized two product lines – one in the field of printed RFID) that has the brand name PolyID and a second product line in the field of smart objects that has the brand name PolyLogo. In the past, the realization of first products often seemed like pie in the sky.

During the last four years, PolyIC has shown steady progress en route to printed products and will now, as announced, be rolling out first products at the leading conference for organic electronics, the Organic Electronics Conference (OEC) 2007 in Frankfurt.

Says Managing Director Wolfgang Mildner: “With these first printed products, we will reach completely different market segments to conventional RFID transponders. Thus, we can tap into an enormous market potential, which PolyIC will approach with several pilot applications. We are already testing possible fields of application with various pilot customers. Our first products provide features ranging from presence control to 4-bit memory capacity in the PolyID product line and even have a display function in the PolyLogo® product line.”

Applications of products from the PolyID and PolyLogo lines will be presented at OEC 2007. PolyIC presents applications in the fields of brand protection, voucher systems, marketing, and logistics.

Within the PRISMA (Printed Smart Labels) project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and has PolyIC as its consortium manager, all tickets to the Organic Electronics Conference will have a PolyID tag attached to them. The tickets will be evaluated with a radio frequency reader at 13.56 MHz. This ticketing field test is being coordinated by Bartsch GmbH.

The steady progress en route to products at PolyIC can also be seen with the results in the laboratory. Thus, 32- and 64-bit RFID chips have been produced in the clean room. This success shows that the production of RFID chips with more memory capacity on the basis of the polymer semiconductor polythiophene is possible.