Inkjet Printed Wearable and Flexible Tags for tracking and RFID applications
The advances in metallic nanoparticles printing have enabled printing of electronics on substrates which are cheaper, lighter, thinner, environment friendly and suitable for flexible and conformal gadgets.
Overview
Location tracking has recently received major industrial and research attention as it can be used for a large number of diverse applications. Safety applications like a child, elderly, pet or vehicle tracking, context-aware services for advertisement, facilitation services like driving directions, friend finder and real-time crowd information for mass management are some of them. Customer base for this market is forecasted to grow at an annual rate of approximately 40 percent, reaching $1 billion in 2017. However, despite the positive indicators, the current solutions for personnel tracking are costly, bulky and inconvenient to carry.
Conventional fabrication techniques for the manufacturing of these location tracking devices include lithography and milling, with Silicon and FR4 being the common base materials. To overcome the limitations of these materials, interest in alternate fabrication technologies such as inkjet printing on substrates like paper, polymer and other organic materials has been seen lately. The advances in metallic nanoparticle printing have enabled printing of electronics on substrates which are cheaper, lighter, thinner, environment-friendly and suitable for flexible and conformal gadgets. Furthermore, inkjet printing is an additive process which does not require expensive lithography masks. Moreover, it is suitable for large scale production as it can be up-scaled to reel-to-reel or roll-to-roll printing. Such a technology can be used to design wearable Tags for various applications such as outdoor and indoor tracking, RFIDs and others.
