HOME
| Chance to get ‘filthy rich from cat flap’ |
| Written by Sam Fountain | |
| Wednesday, 12 March 2008 | |
 Within a whisker of becoming a major player in RFID: Cambridge Resonant Technologies is purring in a key segment of the marketplace Cambridge Resonant Technologies has developed an improved tuning circuit for radio frequency identification tags. Working at low and high frequencies, the technology could deliver an improvement in the cost, power consumption, range, multitag reading, and other parameters of so-called high-frequency or HF RFID. The company is using the cat flap as the proving ground for the technology, developing a product that reads the tags injected into cats so “only your cat comes in the door.” While researching ideas for the automatic cat flap, Cambridge Resonant Technologies made some interesting discoveries about as-yet unexplored properties of HF RFID. “The technology we have developed – called OnTune technology – is a change to some of the fundamental building blocks of RFID,” said founder, Nick Hill. “The concept of RFID has been around for decades and has changed very little in that time. What we’ve done is change one of the fundamental building blocks of RFID, and that gives it some very interesting properties. “By basing readers and tags on a new class of resonator we can open up a new set of properties that improve performance over a wide range of applications.” Hill explained the unlikely way in which the company hit upon this important discovery: “The technology actually originated in the product idea of an RFID cat flap! The concept is that your cat may already be microchipped, which means that you can setup a cat flap with a built in reader. It learns the ID code of your cat’s standard implant chip and only lets them in. “The chips are designed to be small and are short range so in order to make a successful product the reader technology needed some major improvements, both in performance and cost. Our solution turned out to be very successful and wide ranging in application.” Hill said that the new RFID reader technology that CRT has developed offers improved ‘detuning tolerance’ – overcoming range problems experienced by conventional RFID with metal and water. The OnTune technology also offers improved tolerance to manufacturing variation reducing cost by eliminating any tuning step that might be required at manufacture, compensating for increased levels of variation, according to Hill. It also allows the use of high efficiency antennae. “Conventional technology struggles here with fine tuning requirements and slow communication. These constraints are bypassed with OnTune and we have demonstrated major efficiency improvements – up to ten times – over typical conventional systems,” said Hill. “We see OnTune being applied very widely at low frequency – for example animal ID – and high frequency, the most common RFID frequency. “Initially we are concentrating on RFID readers, but ultimately there are benefits we will be able to bring to tags as well.” The company is looking toward a launch of its first product, the SureFlap catflap, at the largest small-animal tradeshow in Europe next month and has partnered with the leading pet-microchipping company in the UK to provide market visibility. Hill is confident that Cambridge Resonant’s first product offering will provide funding to take the company forward with further development of the OnTune technology. “We’re expecting high market uptake but we need to actually get it into the marketplace to comment on that. Nine million cats in six million UK households – that’s a large potential market in the UK alone.” As far as what we can expect next from the Cambridge RFID pioneer, Hill is playing his cards very close to his chest. “We expect to take this product worldwide and also add additional animal ID products that take advantage of the same supply chain,” he said. “We are also progressing the core technology, which will be supported by revenue from the product sales. We expect to both develop our own products and also license the technology in a number of areas.” CRT is not the only East of England company pushing the boundaries of RFID technology, according to sector analyst, IDTechEx. Companies in the region are “changing the fundamental building blocks of RFID, exploring ways to make the technology more powerful, more efficient and more cost effective,” according to Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx. One key area of endeavour locally, besides HF RFID, is in replacing the existing silicon chip used inside RFID tags with a printed circuit which will, among other benefits, drastically reduce the cost per tag. In industries such as logistics, where thousands of tags can be deployed in one location, a major cost reduction could greatly increase the availability of the technology. But the benefits realised by replacing the costly silicon in RFID tags are not just cost-based. “There is huge interest in replacing the silicon chip in an RFID tag, and nowadays that is driven by more than cost” said Harrop. “Various alternatives being developed across the world are showing critically improved performance such as edible tags on meat, and tags that work at exceptional distances without a battery, even terahertz performance. “Some are exceptionally thin and, of course, that cost saving of up to 90 per cent is vital for really high volume tagging of postal and consumer items which can never be achieved using silicon chips.” In the East of England specifically, a number of companies are working on the technology in this area, calling on the region’s expertise in the inkjet printing and flexible electronics fields. “Companies such as Conductive Inkjet Technology, Plastic Logic, Novalia - all based in Cambridge - and others are developing printed electronics relevant to RFID,” said Raghu Das at IDTechEx. “While not all are prioritising RFID now, they can do with their technology platform in the future.”
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email This
Hits: 1036 Trackback(0)
Comments (1)
 Write comment
This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Delicious
Digg
NewsVine
Reddit
Technorati| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
In this news category
Featured business directory listing
 Bailey Fisher www.baileyfisher.com Category: Consultancy and Services |