Hold the Chips: Chipless Technology, an Alternative Technique for RFID

TLDR

RFID technology, now ubiquitous across many industries and valued at billions of dollars with annual growth over 10 %, is widely deployed in applications ranging from supply‑chain tracking to everyday consumer use, yet its conventional chip‑and‑antenna tags face cost, reliability, and recyclability challenges. Figure 1 shows that the dominant RFID class uses an IC chip coupled to an antenna to store data, while emerging designs add sensing and tag‑to‑tag communication features, driving the Internet‑of‑Things paradigm.

Abstract

Entering "RFID" on your Web browser will return you more than 50 million links. This huge number of references is a result of the impact of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology worldwide [1]. Indeed, RFID technology is exploited in numerous domains, with thousands of applications, including more and more seen in everyday life. The RFID market is worth several billion dollars today, and its growth is more than 10% per year [2], [3]. There are two main classes of RFID devices. Figure 1 illustrates the main features of each class. The most known and broadly used class is the one based on the use of an integrated circuit (IC) chip in which the information is stored and that is connected to an antenna; the two together form the "tag." Such a technology exhibits several advantages, including flexibility and versatility in terms of the application. Nevertheless, it has some drawbacks mostly in terms of cost, robustness, reliability, data security, and poor recyclability of tags. More properties and new functionalities, such as sensing capabilities and tag-totag communication [4], are continually being developed, leading to the new paradigm of Internet of Things [5].