RFID tag revealed

RFID tag revealed

Source Link: news.bbc.co.uk

The world's smallest radio frequency identification tags have been unveiled by Japanese electronics firm Hitachi.

Recently, Hitachi unveiled another RFID tag, the Mu-chip, which measures 0.4mm by 0.4mm (0.02x0.02in).

However, some have raised concerns that the technology poses a threat to privacy, and that it could be used in covert monitoring schemes.

However, said Mr Takeuchi: "We are not imagining such uses."

(visit the link for the full news article)

when reporting these stories , it is best to honestly report the entire story , not just cherry picked sensationalist soundbites .

They have one major issue, however - they need an external antenna to work, and the smallest antenna developed so far is about 80 times bigger than the tags.

puts the entire thing in perspective

Originally posted by ignorant_ape
when reporting these stories , it is best to honestly report the entire story , not just cherry picked sensationalist soundbites .

They have one major issue, however - they need an external antenna to work, and the smallest antenna developed so far is about 80 times bigger than the tags.

puts the entire thing in perspective

I would've added more info, if there was more space... 500 characters is a bit tight. maybe 750-1000 is fine for me.

I think in time the antenna will shrink... its just a matter of time. The problem is "when?" My best guess whould be in 2-3 years, they will fix this problem.

I'm sure this technology will mature to the point that everything you buy will have a tag on it. The advantages of RFID to retailers is just too great for it not to happen.

Originally posted by The_unraveller
I think in time the antenna will shrink... its just a matter of time. The problem is "when?" My best guess whould be in 2-3 years, they will fix this problem.

The length of the antenna is related to the wavelength used by the tag. You can't make it infinitely small. Or even reasonably small.

At any rate, the Mu is an E-field tag. It has a very short range, and it doesn't have collision avoidance, so you can't use it at a distance, and you can't interrogate a pile of them mixed together. It's more of a POS sort of device you'd use at a checkout. You couldn't "implant" it.

As it is right now, you can't have undetectable tags that broadcast a signal over long distances, so you can't, say, tag someone, and then follow them with satellites across the country or the world.


But its inevitable that the techonology will get to that point, and its likely that it will get pretty close to it, or something like it, before long.

Its simply unavoidable, the future of humanity is that people will be watched extremely closely by central authorities, its just something that humans are going to have to adapt to.

nick begich, the geezer who talks about harrp, reckons he has found documents stating that they a a chip the size of a human cell. begich seems to stick to info he can prove by documents released.

so this hitachi stuff will be old hat, to what they really have.

Originally posted by Nygdan
As it is right now, you can't have undetectable tags that broadcast a signal over long distances, so you can't, say, tag someone, and then follow them with satellites across the country or the world.


But its inevitable that the techonology will get to that point, and its likely that it will get pretty close to it, or something like it, before long.

Its simply unavoidable, the future of humanity is that people will be watched extremely closely by central authorities, its just something that humans are going to have to adapt to.

Well, I don't know about that. Let's look at what the issues are, real briefly. I tend to run on with the technical jargon because I work with this stuff, but I don't think anyone really wants the math so I'll try to skip to the good parts.

Implants

You can't use an E-field tag for an implant. E-field is what you'd call radio transmission. You are conductive, at least fairly so, and any transmission from inside you will end up attenuated really badly. The higher the frequency, the worse it is. This is important, because the higher the frequency, the smaller you can make the antenna.

Antenna size is inversely related to the frequency you're trying to send and/or receive. You can play tricks on the receive part but nothing is going to help you a lot with the transmit end. If you don't have the proper size antenna to transmit with, you trade off efficiency. You can't just arbitrarily choose the length of your transmit antenna. Assuming you want to transmit quite some distance to an antenna that's maybe not really optimal, say from your head to a satellite, you're going to be in trouble.

The conductive saline in your body is going to mop up the high frequency you'll have to use like a sponge. Given that the "implant" has to be pretty small, and therefore can't have much of a battery, you will want efficiency. However, that has to play against having the antenna be a size that will fit inside you without being real apparent, yet as the frequency goes up to get that antenna shorter, your body will absorb the transmission as heat more and more efficiently. Further, you don't have but a few milliWatts to play with anyway due to the battery size.

You can forget passive E-field devices that are powered from outside. By the time the excitation wave makes it down from even a nuclear powered satellite, it's down to microWatts. Then it has to pass through your body to the implant, there goes over 99% of it, then power the implant, retransmit through your body again, then back to the satellite, losing power constantly as the square of the distance.

Nope. Passive ain't going to work with E-field, neither will you be able to fit a battery in there with enough ass. By the time you could make a transmission inside your body that left enough for a satellite to receive, you'd be screaming and writhing around from the hole it was burning in you.

All implants use H-field, also called reactive power or near field. They all mean the same thing...the magnetic field component of a wave in the near-field area of the antenna. H-field tags don't have that problem with your body absorbing the magnetic field component of the wave, because you really don't have much in the way of magnetic field interaction in your body. Not the way you do with E fields. So the H-field component passes right through with minimal attenuation.

But reactive H-fields don't propagate like a radio wave, or E-field. Since they don't hook up to an E-field and become a self-propagating wave, they fall off as the sixth power of the distance between the two antennas. This is assuming that you're using coils on both ends. The other assumptions involve infinite planes and the like, so there's not much getting around it.

Falling off as the sixth power is a real bad thing. Among other things, it means you won't be able to muster up enough power in an implant to reach 50 feet much less a satellite.

Worse still is the way that H-field tags work, with load modulation. Beyond what I'll call the lambda wall, which is the near-field boundary, you can't return load modulation to the exciter. So there is a physical boundary beyond which you can't interrogate an H-field device, even if you ignore the signal fall off. That's inversely related to the frequency. The higher the frequency, the faster you hit the lambda wall. For 13.56MHz H-field tags, that's about at 10 feet.

Not to mention that the sixth power fall off works in both directions, so if you have passive H-field tags, you can't get enough power to it to make it go if you are more than two or three feet away. Then all the signal it's returning is lost in the sixth power issue. And since you have to bump up the juice, the interrogator starts having signal-to-noise ratio issues. So, past a few feet, you can't make a passive H-field tag work due to power and snr issues.

Beyond the lambda wall, you can't make them return load modulation, even if they're active tags, because the signal doesn't return to the interrogator.

Anyways, there's a lot of issues with implants and distance. Most of them have a physical phenomenon attached to the limit. I don't think you can get past it.

With external transmitters in their clothing or whatnot, you might have a better chance, but it would have to be self-powered.

Andy1033, I hate to say it but Begich can't write two paragraphs without being wrong. His HAARP stuff is so bogus it's not readable.

At any rate, if you want to pick your cell type, ok, the MU's successor is smaller than a human egg cell, which is the largest one in terms of volume that I know of. But that's with no antenna. The point of getting it small is getting it cheap. Small also reduces some of the issues with flex and crushing. The entire assembly is a couple of inches long.

If you really want to stretch, a spinal nerve, complete with axons, might be a foot long, so every chip ever produced is smaller than a human cell, at least in one dimension.

[edit on 25-2-2007 by Tom Bedlam]