Plastic 12-Bit RFID Tag and Read-Out System With Screen-Printed Antenna

Quad Industries, Agfa, Imec and TNO made an announcement recently that they established and verified a plastic 12-bit RFID tag and read-out systems with security that is screen printed. For the first time, the system combines a screen-printed antenna and a printed user interface that is based on touch, which allows the reader to operate on curved surfaces. The demonstrator has developed for applications pertaining to badge security, but also shows scope for many other applications as well such as smart packages, games that require interaction and wearables.

Compared to silicon (Si)-based identification devices, RFID tags that are made of plastic electronics have more advantages. They can be attached to curved packaging, effortlessly incorporated in everyday objects and its manufacturing is low-cost. The usual application consists of identification of items, smart food packaging, protecting the brand and badge security. A dedicated RFID reader is needed to scan the RFID tag which is usually in two centimetres of the tag. The antenna in the tag as well as the reader should both be flexible, utilising the advantages of plastic electronics to the fullest. Screen-printed antennas have been applied effectively on the top of an RFID tag but inflexible PCB-based antennas are generally used by the read-out systems. This is primarily because of the fact that the printed antenna has a poor resistance and Q-factor.

For the first time, industries like Imec, Quad Industries and Agfa have combined a screen-printed antenna in both of the items, the RFID tag as well as the read-out system. This allows the application of both these devices on a diverse range of surfaces. Quad Industries have screen-printed antennas using printing inks from Agfa.

This new technology has been demonstrated in an application pertaining to badge security. The access badge integrates the printed antenna, which is size of a credit-card, with a plastic 12-bit RFID chip, placed on plastic substrate that’s flexible. Imec’s metal-oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) technology has been used to manufacture the RFID tag. Large-area manufacturing processes are used by this technology that makes large-scale production at a low cost possible.

The read-out system includes uniquely printed functionality at diverse levels. To begin with, an RFID read-out antenna is made by screen-printing on a plastic film, making room for best possible integration on flat, curved or 3-D shaped reading surfaces. Also, a fully printed touch screen interface with numerical keypad has been placed between the cover lens and the display, which allows any user without a badge to enter the building by punching in a numerical code. Highly transparent screen-printed inks have been used to print these printed touch screen.

There are recently developed Ag inks which are nanoparticle based that makes lower resistances over conventional Ag-flake based inks achievable which in turn enables integrating new functionalities directly by screen printing. In addition to this, the antenna is printed at the same level as the printed touch screen which results in direct, more economical combination of the printed antenna and the customized touch screen in the device that’s the reader.

This technology allows for economical screen-printing manufacturing, is effortlessly customizable and eco-friendly and allows direct chip integration on many substrates which includes plastics, paper, etc. This technology also sees a promising use in smart packaging, smart PCB and smart gaming.

Sensor Solution: Sensor Boutique for Early Adopters

It is known that a very individual fraction of infrared light is absorbed by every chemical substance. This absorption can be used for recognising substances with the help of optical methods, which is almost like the concept of a human fingerprint.

To elaborate this concept, when the infrared radiation, that falls within a certain range of wavelength, are absorbed by molecules, they are animated to a higher level of vibration, in which they rotate and vibrate in a typical and distinctive pattern or rather in a “fingerprint” pattern. These patterns can be used for identifying specific chemical species. Such kind of a method is used, let’s say, for example, in the chemical industry but also has its uses in the health sector or in criminal investigation. A company often needs an individually tailored sensor solution if it plans a new project.

EU-funded pilot line called MIRPHAB (Mid InfraRedPhotonics devices fABrication for chemical sensing and spectroscopic applications) support companies that in search for a suitable system and help in the development of sensor technology and measurement technology in mid-infrared (MIR). Participating in this project is the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF.

Pilot line for ideal spectroscopy solutions

A company has very individual needs if it is looking for a sensor solution, for example, if it has to identify a particular substance in a production process. This begins with the substances that have to be recorded to the number of sensors required up to the speed of the process of production.Considering most of the cases, a custom-made solution that suits all does not suffice and various suppliers are required for the purpose of developing the optimal individual solution.Here is where MIRPHAB comes into picture and proves to be very useful.

Leading European research institutes and companies belonging to the MIR environment have collaborated to provide customers with a custom-made and best suited offers made from a single source. Parties that are interested can get in touch with a central contact person, who can then make a compilation of the best solutions possible from the MIRPHAB members component portfolio as per the modular principle.

EU funding has supported MIRPHAB in the development of the individual MIR sensor solution within the framework, in order to fortify the European industry in the long run and increase in its leading position in chemical analysis and sensor technology. This considerably lessens the investment costs and as a result also reduces the entry point for companies in the MIR area.

Companies that have previously faced high costs and development efforts are now looking at a high-quality MIR sensor solution as an object of interest due to its combination with the virtual infrastructure which is a development caused by MIRPHAB.Also, MIRPHAB provides companies access to the latest and modern technologies, enabling them with an added advantage as an early adopter compared to the competition.

Custom-madesource forMIR lasers

The Freiburg-basedFraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF along with the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS situated in Dresden, is providing a central component of the MIRPHAB sensor solution. The Fraunhofer IAF is presenting the new technology of quantum cascade lasers that emanate laser light in the range of MIR. In this type of laser, the range of the wavelength of the emitted light is spectrally extensive and can be adapted as per requirement during manufacturing. To select a particular wavelength within the broad spectral range, an optical diffraction grating has to be used to choose and then coupled back into the laser chip. The wavelength can be adjusted constantly by turning the grating. This grating is created at the Fraunhofer IPMS in a scaled-down form in so-called Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System or MEMS technology.Thus it is then possible to oscillate the grating up to one kilohertz of frequency. This further enables the tuning of the laser source’s wavelength up to a thousand times per second over a large range of spectrum.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen also has involvement in MIRPHAB in order to make the manufacturing of lasers and ratings more proficient and to enhance them for pilot series fabrication.With the help of its proficiency, it changes the production of the quickly adaptable MIR laser into industrially applicable manufacturing processes.

Process exploration in actuality

Currently, there are many applications in the field of spectroscopy that are still in the category of visible or near the range of infrared and use comparatively feeble light sources. MIRPHAB provides solutions has the concept of infrared semiconductor lasers as a foundation. These have comparatively higher intensity of light thus allowing the scope for completely new applications. This results in a recording of up to 1,000 spectra per second with the help of the MIR laser source which, as an example, provides for the real time programmed monitoring and control of biotechnological processes and chemical reactions. Thus, MIRPHAB’s contribution is considered to be important and vital to the factory of the future.

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Make More Human Decisions?

About 88 million pages of original and authentic handwritten documents belonging to the past three-and-a-half centuries, line the tiled halls of a simple 16th-century trading house located right in the middle of Seville, Spain. These are stored here, incompletely transliterated, where some of them are almost indecipherable. A few of them were carried back on armadas from the Americas while a few have undergone scanning and digitisation.

These documents contain the answers and the context for the innumerable questions pertaining to the Conquistadors, the European history, the New World contact and colonialism, politics, law, economics and ancestry. However, it is unfortunate that hardly some of these carefully kept pages were ever read or interpreted since they were written and brought to Seville centuries before and it is highly unlikely that most of them never will be.

All hope is not lost as a researcher from the Stevens Institute of Technology is trying to get computers to read these documents, before we are out of time, while the documents are still readable. A Stevens computer science professor, Fernando Perez-Cruz asks “What if there was a machine, or a software, that could transcribe all of the documents?”.

Perez-Cruz, who’s expertise lies in the research area of machine learning also says “What if there was a way to teach another machine to combine into groups those 88 million pages and convert them into searchable text categorised into topics? Then we can start understanding the themes in those documents and then will be aware where to look in this storehouse of documents for our answers”. Thus Perez-Cruz is working on both factors of this two-fold approach which, if right, could then be applicable to many other new age and futuristic data analysis queries such as independent transport and analysis of medical data.

Pricing on Amazon, medical study, text reading machines

Perez-Cruz, who is a veteran of Amazon, Bell Labs, Princeton University and University Carlos III of Madrid, has had a very interesting career dealing with scientific challenges.In 2016, he joined Stevens and contributed to the growing asset of the computer science department of the university. Stevens aims at making this a strong research department which in turn is drawing more talent and resources. Perez-Cruz is using this to his advantage in his work. Currently, at Stevens, he is working to develop something called as ‘interpretable machine learning’ which is a systematized intelligence that humans can still work on.

As far as the problem of the historical document analysis is concerned, Perez-Cruz is in the hopes that he will be able to develop improved character-recognition engines. With the help of short excerpts of documents written in varied styles, which have been earlier transliterated by experts, he aims to teach software to identify both the forms of characters and often correlated associations between letters and words, thus constructing a growing recognition engine over time that is absolutely precise. The only question remains, he says, is that how much data or how much handwriting that is transcribed, is sufficient to do this well. The work on this concept is still developing.

Perez-Cruz states that he believes even though it is a technical challenge, it may still be achievable. He is even more fascinated about the next part which is organisation of large quantities of transcribed matter into topics that can be used in a glance. He says that the machine should be able to give us information right away from these three-and-a-half centuries of data when transcribed and should itself learn from the locations of the words and sentences. This is, what he calls, topic modelling.

A key link: Systematically grouping large data into easily accessible topics

After sufficient data has been entered into the algorithm, it begins to spot the most vital identifying and organizing forms and designs in the data. Very often, it so happens that various cues from the human researchers are vital and are searched for.Perez-Cruz notes that eventually, we might discover that there are, let’s say, a few hundred topics or descriptions that run through the whole of this archive and then all of a sudden there may be 88-million-document problems that have been scaled-down to 200 or 300 ideas.

If algorithms can consolidate 88 million pages of text into a few hundred lots, a huge progress in systematisation and efficiency can be achieved by historians and researchers who need to make choices about which particular document, theme or time periods are to be searched, reviewed and analysed in the formerly unmanageable archive. The same concept could be used to find styles, themes and concealed meaning in other vast unread databases.

He concludes saying that one begins with a huge quantity of unorganised data and in order to understand what material does that data contain and how it can be used, a kind of a structure needs to be brought to that data. Once the data is comprehended, one can begin to read it in a particular way, understand better what questions are to be asked pertaining to that information and make better conclusions.

Students Present Solar Car for 5 Occupants

Stella Vie – `Car of the Future’

The Students at Eindhoven University of TechnologyTU/ehave presented a solar car for 5 occupants known as Stella Vie.The team has been considering this car as a source to secure its third world title at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia (8-16 October) where it expects to highlight the prospective of solar powered family cars.

The new solar powered family car that had been unveiled recently is said to be the successor of Stella Lux and the Stella will be entered in the Bridgestone World Solar challenge in Australia later this year according to the announcement on the website of the university by TU Eindhoven solar team.

The most amazing fact regarding this car is that for the first time, it has been equipped to carry five occupants, instead of four and seems to be much more efficient than all the solar cars before it. The car has the potential of a range of around 1,000 kilometres on a summer’s day in Netherlands with few solar panels on its roof. As per the students, Stella Vie, a reference to daily family life is said to be `the car of the future’. Being powered by the sun, it has the tendency of reaching a speed of around 130 kilometres per hour.
 

Smart Navigation System

  The car comprises of new, smart technology such as parking navigation system which tends to take account of the position of the sun while parking.The car’s smart navigation system also tends to utilise the updated V2X technology to caution the driver regarding the upcoming traffic condition, enabling a safe and a much more efficient voyage.

 In order to save energy still further, Stella Vie tends to gently shove the user to drive efficiently as possible by giving refined feedback via a built-in lighting system that is inclined to caution the driver by turning red if they seem to brake too fast or speed up too violently.

From Eindhoven University of Technology, the team comprising of 23 students would be defending its world title in this forthcoming bi-annual, solar-powered car competition which tends to run 3,000 kilometres through the wilderness of Australia.The Eindhoven team had won the title in 2013 in the Cruiser Class with the Stella. The team would be competing in the Cruiser Class, for practical cars, where judging would be based on technical innovation, battery consumption together with the number of occupancy on board.
 

Solar Team Eindhoven – Contribution to Clean World

  Teams from Delft as well as Twente have been competing in the Challenger Class in the contest for the quickest solo occupant car. The Solar Team at Eindhoven have already portrayed to the world that there is a possibility of constructing an energy competent family car.

The team have designed Stella Vie to slowdown an impeccable steadiness between aerodynamic and aesthetic design and is createdto be more efficient than its forerunner, the Stella Lux.The Vie tends to increase the aero- dynamicity of its earlier siblings by 9%.

The Solar Team Eindhoven tends to make its contribution to a clean world and the main focus is to create a solar car which will be ready for the market in the future. One can imagine a world where cars would no longer require fossil fuels, a world where cars tend to be energy positive.

Selfies: Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life

Study – First Significant Experimental Research on Selfie

 
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have scrutinized through 2.5 million selfie post on Instagram, to comprehend the photographic spectacle better and how people tend to form their personalities online and to determine what types of identity statement people tend to make on taking and sharing selfies. When it comes to Selfies, appearance tends to be almost everything.

Almost 52% of all selfies tend to fall in the category of appearance, with images of people portraying their make-up, clothes, lips etc. Images regarding looks seems to be twice more well-known than the other 14 categories altogether. After the appearance category, social selfies with friends, loved ones as well as pets were most common to 14%.

The ethnicity images at 13%, travel – 7% and health and fitness to 5%. It was observed by the researchers that the prevalence of ethnicity selfies is an indication that people seem to be proud of their background and also found that several selfies were solo picture instead of taken with a group. The data had been collected in the summer of 2015.the Georgia Tech team are of the belief that the study is the first significant experimental research on selfies.
 

Selfie – An Identity Performance

 
Generally, on Instagram, an overpowering 57% of selfies had been posted by 18-35 year old multitude which according to the researchers is not too surprising taking into account the demographic of the social media platform.

Selfies posted by the under-18 age group was about 30% while the older group of 35+ shared them less often around 13%. Appearance on the other hand was most popular among the crowd of all age groups. Julia Deeb-Swihart, lead author stated that selfies are an identity performance which means that users tend to carefully craft the way they may tend to appear online, which is an extension of that.

 Deep-Swihart had stated that `just like on other social media channels, people are inclined to project an identity promoting their wealth, health together with physical attractiveness, with selfies we decide how to present ourselves to the audience and the audiences tends to decide how it identifies you.

 

Type of Blending of Online/Offline Selves

  This work is stuck in the theory offered by Erving Goffman in `The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. The attires we tend to choose to wear together with the social roles we are inclined to play, are all intended to control the version of ourselves we prefer our peers to view.

Deeb-Swihart had commented that `selfies are a type of blending of our online and offline selves and is a way to prove what is true in your life or at least what one would want people to believe is true’. The data had been accumulated by the researchers by searching for `#selfie’, then utilised computer vision to confirm that the pictures really included faces.

 Almost half of them did not seem to have and they found plenty of spam with blank images or text. The accounts had been utilising the hashtag in order to show up in additional searches for the purpose of obtaining more followers.