Alien Technology uses licensed production method to reduce RFID tag price
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
One of the last big barriers to rapid adoption of RFID technology—tag unit costs—was breached this summer when Alien Technology ramped up its brand new fluidic self-assembly (FSA) line at its Morgan Hill, Calif.-based headquarters, jumping run rates from millions to billions of units per year.
"For orders of a million units, we price fully converted labels at 20 cents apiece," says Tom Pounds, VP of corporate development. "This is a dramatic advance over anything seen before in terms of pricing. For our best customers, we're anticipating approaching ten cents per label in 2006."
Million-unit orders are not new for Alien: it currently has a multiyear, 500-million-unit order with Gillette. Alien also has been involved with a Department of Defense pilot project for tracking rations shipments for field troops. Those tags also are programmed to record temperature variations of goods in transit.
The proprietary FSA line is based on technology Alien licenses from the University of California Berkeley. The patented process enables production of high-quality Class 1 RFID tags in unprecedented volumes. It's based on the efficient placement of very large numbers of small components across a surface in a single operation. The company's NanoBlock circuits are suspended in liquid that's flowed over a substrate where they settle into position, making it possible to migrate from batch mode to a real-to-real continuous production process. Unit production rates consequently jump from 10,000 per hour to two million an hour. The new line represents the second generation of FSA production at the Morgan Hill facility.
Supply chain execution vendor Manhattan Associates, an investor in Alien Technology, has bundled Alien tags with its software, and currently is offering it as a turnkey "RFID in a Box" solution—making it an easy entry point for customers wanting to get into RFID tagging.
