The most amazing thing about this (and another tiny RFID chip that was on HN recently) is not that you can print them on wafers, but that you can cut up the wafers and handle these tiny dies. Imagine you manufactured sugar, but had to manipulate each sugar grain separately.
If you want the bare chips and not full assembled labels the usual packaging is uncut wafer and cutting out and handling the individual dies is your problem.
I have always wondered how this works (along with wire bonding), especially in an economic way.
Chips being cheap makes sense at the lithography / wafer level because sure, you can stamp out thousands of them at once. But once you need to dice them up, bond wires to them, and package them... how on earth do you do that so efficiently that each chip can be sold for fractions of a cent?
Still needs an antenna tuned to the RFID frequency which will be much larger than the chip. It's cool engineering but doesn't mean you can have a working sub-mm tag.
No, but the chip does usually put a cap on the thinness of the whole assembly (e.g. for cards). This means you can have a paper-thin NFC sticker (which we have now, I guess).
honestly given how long ago that was I'd not be surprised if everything's completely peppered with chips... one from the manufacturer, one from inventory, one from logistic, one from corporate espionage agent, one from foreign adversary state actor sky really is the limit with these.
didn't parmesan put some chips in their cheese too?
In an early example of conspiracy theories that would eventually envelop social media, I actually remember internet commenters pointing to the previous generation of these as supposed "proof" that the government was embedding RFID chips in banknotes to track people (following a blog article by Alex Jones): https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/03/02/0535225/do-your-20-...
Also, you can find previous announcements of Hitachi's μ-Chip series. In 2001, evidently, they put out a 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm chip.
Not being programmable at all and just transmitting a 128 bit number would help get the size down.
Let's compare to a Monza R6 chip that was introduced in 2014, I think. This thing is 0.464 by 0.442 mm according to the datasheet, so quite a bit larger even than the 2001 read-only μ-Chip.
But it it has a two-way communication with the controller, and writable memory. You can enable password protection and such.
The newer M800 series is smaller: 0.247 mm × 0.362 mm, but still larger than the 2005 read-only μ-Chip. There are more features: fatter datasheet. Things like a privacy mode: tag remains radio silent unless it sees a specific 32 bit code from the reader.
You know how you can hold a totally unrelated RFID tag to a door reader and have the reader beep, indicating it has communicated with the tag? This looks like the feature that would prevent that. That could be useful.
22 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadChips being cheap makes sense at the lithography / wafer level because sure, you can stamp out thousands of them at once. But once you need to dice them up, bond wires to them, and package them... how on earth do you do that so efficiently that each chip can be sold for fractions of a cent?
https://www.tirereview.com/michelin-connect-car-tires-rfid-2...
Not being programmable at all and just transmitting a 128 bit number would help get the size down.
Let's compare to a Monza R6 chip that was introduced in 2014, I think. This thing is 0.464 by 0.442 mm according to the datasheet, so quite a bit larger even than the 2001 read-only μ-Chip.
But it it has a two-way communication with the controller, and writable memory. You can enable password protection and such.
The newer M800 series is smaller: 0.247 mm × 0.362 mm, but still larger than the 2005 read-only μ-Chip. There are more features: fatter datasheet. Things like a privacy mode: tag remains radio silent unless it sees a specific 32 bit code from the reader.
You know how you can hold a totally unrelated RFID tag to a door reader and have the reader beep, indicating it has communicated with the tag? This looks like the feature that would prevent that. That could be useful.