Thinfilm Demonstrates First Printed Near Field Communication Enabled Smart Label
Thin Film Electronics ASA has announced that it has successfully demonstrated the world’s first Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled printed smart label. The system integrates printed electronic labels with real-time temperature sensing and NFC to allow for seamless wireless data capture and exchange of information. The NFC-enabled temperature-sensing label represents the first in a potentially wide range of sensing products from Thinfilm. This highly versatile, multi-sensor platform offers many potential commercial applications such as sensing temperature, time, humidity, light, and blood, oxygen and glucose levels.
Potential usages include the monitoring of time via an identification badge to give organizations control and security over access to an event or workplace during restricted hours, or sensing humidity to ensure that pharmaceutical products are not compromised. In the NFC Smart Label, PDPS logic supports high-frequency radio and detects when a critical temperature threshold has been exceeded. An NFC-enabled smartphone then wirelessly detects the signal and displays a corresponding alert on the device’s screen. Because the Smart Label contains a unique ID in addition to the sensor data, it is possible to log the alert in a cloud-based application for further analysis.
The Thinfilm Smart Label platform is designed to accommodate a variety of sensing elements, both printed and conventional. Depending on the application and necessary components, labels may either be fully printed or feature a combination of printed and surface-mounted elements. Furthermore, using PDSP allows Thinfilm engineers to significantly compress the cycle time for new designs, enabling faster time-to-market for new sensing elements as they are developed.
Today’s announcement on the addition of NFC capabilities to Thinfilm’s Smart Label builds on significant technical milestones, including:
- Closed, stand-alone system built from printed and organic electronics (October 2013)
- Low-voltage display driver based on complementary organic logic (June 2013)
- Memory write based on detection of temperature thresholds (December 2012)
- Full addressing logic for multi-bit read-write of printed memory (October 2011)
Thinfilm has now demonstrated all components necessary to produce its first NFC-enabled integrated-system product and expects to deliver commercial samples of the Smart Label to the market in 2015.
Thin Film Electronics ASA
+47 23 27 51 59
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