Technology

Current implementations of chipless tags have limitations. They have to be ‎read from within a few centimeters. Other solutions required the reader to pass over the entire length ‎of the label to pick up the serial number, (This method also required proximity).

Others chipless tag solutions are quite expensive for small amount of units‎ since they are required to be produced in a very expensive process in order to make it unique. Every single customer needs to own a unique production line and own unique combination of owned identical tags.

Each customer has different and unique tags but all his tags are identical. The chipless tag vendors demand a unique product line for each customer… this fact alone has a direct influence on the costs and makes it impossible to produce an order of small amount of tags in a reasonable price. In addition there are no degrees of freedom to let the customer combining its own chipless tag combinations or values as desired or needed.

CrossID patented technology is in the area of the chipless RFID. The technology provides the possibility to create a chipless tag with endless combinations, which costs less than one cent each, even a small amount of tags can be created with the same low cost as huge ‎amount and can be read from a distance without the need for line of sight.

The “CrossID” principle:
A Sawdust or liquid (Ink) of refined materials is mixed in a certain way. Under proper physical condition, each element of the pigments mixture will get affected from that phenomenon trigger. All together reaction effects function as a unique readable binary ID. This unique mixture involves only materials (pigments) combination, without electronic parts or chip or any other electric circuit in it. The effected materials (pigments) have an exchangeable binary format. This said integrated combination caused by this said phenomenon reflex effect, appellation as "CrossID".

The innovative technology ensures that CrossID tags have the following benefits:

• Non expensive
• Easily attached to targets
• Unlimited life time
• Does not need power (batteries)
• Environment-friendly
• Visible or Invisible upon demand
• Allows endless binary combinations

CrossID reading system has the following advantages:

• No line of sight needed
• Distant reading
• Multiple tags simultaneous reading
• Penetrating reading of hidden tags. (Except Faraday Cage situation)

CrossID special pigments are attached to the target or its packaging by means of standard printing. CrossID pigments are added to the ink, which acts as a carrier.

There is no need in special printers. Each combination of the different pigments represents a different ID. There could be as many as 2n different IDs, i.e. technologically unlimited.

Background
Automatic identification may be effected in different ways including many bar codes, identification tags and may be used to identify articles and personnel. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology similar in application to bar code technology, but uses radio frequency instead of optical signals. An RFID system consists of two major components — a reader and a tag or card. They work together to provide the end user with a non-contact solution to uniquely identify people, animals or objects. The reader performs several functions, one of which is to produce a low-level radio frequency magnetic field that serves as a “carrier” of power from the reader to the RFID tag.

A passive RFID tag contains an antenna and an integrated circuit (IC). The IC requires only a minimal amount of electrical power to function. The antenna in the tag provides a means for gathering the energy present in the magnetic field produced by the reader, and converts it to an electrical signal for use by the IC. When a tag is brought into the magnetic field produced by the reader, the recovered energy powers the IC, and an electromagnetic signal modulated with data in the memory is transmitted by the tag’s antenna. The electromagnetic signal transmitted from the tag is recovered by an antenna within the reader, and converted back into an electrical form. The reader contains a sensitive receiving system that is designed to detect and process the weak tag signal, demodulating the original data stored in the tag memory.

As opposed to passive tags, active tags contain a miniature battery that provides the operating power for the IC. When interrogated by the reader, the IC broadcasts a signal that identifies itself to sensitive reader detection and data transmission circuits. This allows the tag to begin sending its data at a considerably greater distance from the reader than its passive counterpart. Additionally, an active tag uses battery energy to produce a much stronger electromagnetic response signal. All of these results in a significantly greater read range than a passive tag.

Many present and upcoming applications require the ability to automatically identify objects from a distance. RFID provides this requirement to some degree and has the benefit that line-of-sight between the reader and tag is not required. This is distinct from optical recognition techniques, such as barcode, that require the optical reader to be in line of sight from the identified object. Most optical reading techniques also require a directional decoding of the identifying code, giving rise to start and stop bits being part of the code. In a conventional, linear bar code, the order in which the bars appear is critical and changing the order results in a different code. The same is applicable also to RFID tags, where typically reflectors in the tag are used to modulate the RF signal, such that the presence or absence of reflectors affects the resulting code that is returned by the tag.