Kovio Demonstrates RFID Tags Using Printed Electronics
Kovio Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) announced today at a conference in Chicago that it is demonstrating RFID tags based on its printed ICs (PICs). The startup is getting ready to begin manufacturing at its Milpitas fab, using nine electronics-use inks that it developed internally. "Printed electronics is no longer a vision -- it is here," said CEO Amir Mashkoori.
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 10/16/2008
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| Last November, Kovio printed an nFET thin-film transistor (TFT) with electron mobilities of 80 cm2/Vs. Performance now is ~20% higher, and full CMOS functionality has been achieved. |
About a year ago, Kovio Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) said it had used silicon ink and inkjet printers to
print a transistor with respectable performance.
Today, Kovio announced that it is demonstrating RFID tags based on its printed ICs (PICs). The startup is getting ready to begin manufacturing at its Milpitas fab, using additive printing techniques and nine electronics-use inks that it developed internally.
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| Amir Mashkoori, CEO, Kovio |
At EPC Connection 2008, an electronic barcode conference being held in Chicago this week, Kovio CEO Amir Mashkoori said, “Printed electronics is no longer a vision — it is here.” Printed electronics, he said, have a cost advantage because the additive approach uses far less energy, water and gases than conventional subtractive IC production techniques. With virtually no infrastructure to draw upon other than printers used in the graphics printing industry, Kovio has developed an enabling silicon ink and eight other inks that are deposited on thin metal-foil substrates measuring 12-16 in. on a side. The result is lines and spaces ranging from 10 to 150 µm on the initial RFID tags.
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| Kovio’s RFID chips are printed on a 16 x 16 in. sheet of metal. |
After the ink is printed, it forms silicon islands that are annealed to drive out the solvents, leaving a polysilicon crystal film, said Vik Pavate, vice president of business development. Although he called the silicon ink the “enabling ink” for the process, the company also developed oxide inks for the gate dielectric, inks for in situ n- and p-type dopants and, most recently, metal inks for contacts to the silicon and “really good interconnects with good electromigration.”
The company has a goal of reducing the cost of an item-use RFID tag from about 20 cents today to 3 cents by 2015, when projections estimate that 165 billion item-use RFID tags will be manufactured. Kovio is sampling now to customers that will begin trials early next year. Kovio expects to be in volume production at its Milpitas fab by the second quarter of 2009. Its first tags will be used in smart transit systems and for event tickets that have embedded security features, using the printed 128 bits of unalterable ROM.
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| IDTechEx predicts that the market size for item-level RFID tags by 2015 will grow to 163 billion units, valued at $5.3B, with a 101% compound annual growth rate. By then, the average sales price will be cents per tag. |
Although conventional silicon production techniques may continue to be used for the higher-performance RFID tags used by shipping companies, PIC-based tags may enable work-in-progress (WIP) tracking within factories, Pavate said. Eventually, the tags will be attached to retail items such as clothing and bottles. The company also expects PICs to be applied to low-cost sensors, and to other forms of embedded electronics.
The first products have a frequency of 13.56 MHz, a 106 kbps data rate, an integrated capacitor, and the printed ROM. The PIC is not packaged, but is attached to the RFID antenna with open vias on one side and a passivation layer on the other side. Pavate said organic transistors and traditional ICs face difficult packaging challenges for very low-cost markets.
“Conventional ICs aimed at RFID markets also face thinness challenges. A starting wafer size of 250 µm must be backgrinded down in order to create a RFID tag that is &150 µm. We start out at 70 [µm]. Our PICs are extremely thin and easy to handle,” he said, arguing that the relatively low cost of the inkjet, laser and screen printing tools, the simple packaging method, and relatively little use of gases and water all contribute to the cost-effectiveness of the printed electronics solution. “We are doing additive printing, so we don’t have the luxury of using a sputtering tool to deposit metals, and then etching them off,” Pavate said. “At Kovio, we are depositing material only where you need it. Inks are not the cleanest materials, so we spent a lot of effort to purify them. And the viscosity is very important.”
Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx, a market research firm specializing in printed electronics, said, “The Kovio technology is, in our opinion, a big achievement and starts to realize the world of printed electronics. Many have been working on organic electronics, but the nanosilicon ink that Kovio is developing offers much higher mobility and therefore can create RFID tags which can meet existing protocols for chip-level RFID, and work with the existing RFID infrastructure.”
Asked about costs for organic ICs vs. printed electronics, Das said, “It is very hard to say what the costs could be for organic or printed inorganics at this stage. Without question, both can be much cheaper than conventional silicon chip RFID. Both have a shot of achieving sub-1 cent tag prices in high volumes.”
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