Just How Small Is a Smaller RFID Chip? Behold the tiny fruit fly egg.

swiftsureMay 26, 2016 –

North Carolina State University (NCSU) announced this month that its engineers had designed an RFID chip that is 25% smaller.

The question is, smaller than what? And why does it matter? The answers take some imagination and a look at a paper with a big title: Design of a Rectifier-Free UHF Gen-2 Compatible RFID Tag Using RF-Only Logic.

RFID chip is smaller than a 1 mm cube

This is a 1 mm cube. New RFID chip is .6mm x .3 mm.

It’s not uncommon to see press releases touting the newest “smallest” chip, and size has definitely shrunk over the last few years, making RFID a less cumbersome, more affordable asset management solution.

The NCSU chip, though, promises to take design a step further with technology that eliminates the hardware an RFID tag needs to convert alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC).

The new chip is .6 mm x .3 mm.

That’s smaller than a slice of a grain of sand. A sliver of half a honeybee brain. Tinier than a fruit fly egg.

New chips are tinier than a fruit fly egg

New RFID chips are smaller than a fruit fly egg

Perhaps easier to picture, it’s the size of a lower case “o” printed in Times New Roman 5.

Passive RFID tags use rectifiers to convert AC power to DC. NCSU’s innovation enables the tag’s logic to run directly from a radio signal, with circuits operating from AC power. The redesign makes a rectifier unnecessary.

“By eliminating the hardware that is used to convert the AC signal to DC for powering the circuit, we are able to make the RFID tag much smaller and less expensive,” said Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NCSU and the paper’s senior author.

The chips, with technology dubbed RF-only logic, have less range than a conventional EPC Class 1 Gen-2 passive RFID tag.

RF-only logic structure

Minute tags could improve high-speed automation processes and enable affordable sensor applications.

Reduced tag size often comes at the expense of read range. That works for some situations, such as near field communication (NFC) for access control and pay-by-phone. But tracking and managing assets in many environments – such as retail, data centers, manufacturing and supply chains – require read ranges of up to 20 feet.

The NCSU engineering team expects to develop RFID tags with similar range. If its technology evolves to allow minute tags with sufficient read range, it could dramatically improve high-speed automation processes and enable sensor applications with relatively small investments.

NCSU presented its paper on the miniaturized RFID chip May 5 at the IEEE RFID 2016 conference in Orlando, Florida.