BFD
Printed Circuits Soon Will Be Cheap Enough To Track Groceries.
Vivek Subramanian wants to rid the world of barcodes. And no, he's not a conspiracy theorist. The UC Berkeley engineering professor and others in the field of organic semiconducting want to revolutionize retailing by replacing UPCs with smart, dirt-cheap printed circuits.
Envision the UPC-free supermarket of 2012: You wheel your cart through what looks like a metal detector. Your tab is instantly calculated and displayed on a screen. You confirm the charges to your account, grab your receipt, and roll. The grocer saves on labor, you save time, and manufacturers track goods at every step. "We can reduce inventory and take cash out of the system," says Larry Kellam, Procter & Gamble's supply-chain guru.
The underlying technology - radio frequency identification - is already widely employed. Antitheft devices in clothing stores use RFID, as do those windshield-mounted transponders that let commuters sail through toll plazas. The process is simple: A tag reader emits radio waves, setting up an electromagnetic field. A passive transponder - say, a chip on the back of a cereal box - draws enough power from the RF signal to spit back a hard-coded ID number. The reader decodes the reply, checks the store database, and registers "Wheaties, 16 oz., $3.49." Unlike barcodes, RFID tags can be read accurately from a distance and while in motion.
The big hurdles are standards and cost. P&G, which sells $40 billion a year in consumer goods, has joined the Auto-ID Center, a consortium of big names aiming to standardize the technology for retailing. They call it EPC, for electronic product code. Cost is the more serious problem. Silicon tags are pricey; today's cheapest run about a dime - too much for a can of garbanzos. "In grocery stores, the margins are infinitesimal," says Ananth Dodabalapur, who spent more than a decade at Bell Labs pioneering ways to screen-print transistors onto cheap, flexible materials. "The cost has to be in the pennies, not the tens of cents." The Auto-ID crew can't wait. It's testing silicon tags on pallets in Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in Oklahoma. In August, P&G plans to start tagging higher-end items such as perfumes. "We think we'll be able to get chips down to a nickel," says Kellam.
That's where Dodabalapur, Subramanian, and the other organics researchers come in. By replacing silicon with plastics, they figure they can cut the cost even more, to half a cent. Subramanian has built an inkjet printer that lays down capacitors and inductors on plastic, paper, or cloth. His "ink" consists of gold trapped in organic nanocrystal layers. As the device prints, it cooks the organics off. By redesigning the standard nanocrystals, he recently cut the temperature of this last step in half, making it compatible with inexpensive printing surfaces.
Banishing the barcode may require a combination of techniques, from microcontact printing, screen printing, and spin coating to inkjet printing and casting. It may also take time. Scientists estimate that commercially printed chips are still three to five years off. It'll be worth the wait.
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