Pragmatic plastic NFC chip targets all kinds of products
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Pragmatic Semiconductor has launched its next generation low cost plastic chip for near field communications (NFC) that is cheap enough to tag all kinds of consumer products.
The Pragmatic PR1301 NFC Connect is built on a 300mm polyimide substrate at the Pragmatic fab in the UK and expects high volume production later this year. Using a plastic process is significantly lower carbon footprint than silicon NFC chips and the flexible NFC chip can be embedded on products to provide a link to a mobile phone.
“There’s a couple of significant differences to silicon NFC chips that are to our benefit,” says James Davey, SVP Sales, Business Development and Product Management at Pragmatic Semiconductor.
“At 3 x 2mm its bigger than a silicon NFC chip but that brings advantages for the antenna design. What we do is sit across the antenna and act as the bridge for a single sided design,” he tells eeNews Europe.
“Our customers are interested in paper inlays with copper coils,” he said. The most popular size is a coil that fits inside the top of a plastic bottle, allowing the bottles to be tracked reliably. “We provide the FlexIC and our primary customer is an inlay manufacturer. We would consider ourselves a low cost supplier of NFC chips in the billions,” said Davey.
“We see tremendous market demand in fast-moving consumer goods – such as food and beverage, apparel, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics – with applications rapidly extending to smart health and wellness devices, toys and games, and food freshness detection,” said said David Moore, CEO at Pragmatic.
“The FlexICs use the ISO15693 Type 5 protocol – it has commands with a UID inside and with LPROM laser programming. This massively improves cycle time to send it pre-coded. We stage up wafers ready for LPROM and send them to the customer,” he said. This allows the NFC tags to be read by iOS and Android phones and tablets.
“The flexibility is also of interest for the NFC market for example for wash cycles for clothing, or on a cup for asset tracking.”
Customers include packaging giant Avery Dennision, which is an investor in Pragmatic, as well as Tageos, Jinjia Group and Amcor.
“We have capacity coming on line for fab 3 in the middle of this year and we would expect a large proportion of the fab to be filled with this product in Q3 and Q4 with active quotes.” Each 300mm wafer would contain around 11,000 devices.
“In this business timing is everything,” says Davey. “The digital product passport (DPP) is driving interest and demand, for example for tracking clothing for sustainability and recycling.
Initial volume samples of the first member of the NFC Connect product line, PR1301, are available as frame-mounted 300 mm wafers, single die, and sample inlays.
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