XERAFY Company Blog
Xerafy Metal Skin: Getting Ahead of the Curve
February 21, 2012
This week Xerafy debuted the Metal SkinTM, the world’s first true UHF EPC RFID inlay designed for tracking metal assets.
Based on the Impinj Monza 4QT IC, Metal Skin is super thin, lightweight, and flexible enough to be used on the curved surface of metallic cylinders to the backside of an Apple iPad. It can be converted into different form factors such as smart tickets, labels and tags using standard label converting equipment and printing processes.
Metal Skin is a game changing innovation that transforms RFID for metal tracking and Xerafy’s customers who have a sneak peak to evaluate the product have been totally blown away by the inlay form factor and unbelievable performance. The initialization of Metal Skin, as with any of our products, always start with our customers’ unmet needs and the compelling value proposition to create a cost effective, low-profile and flexible tag for tracking metallic items globally. We wanted to create a “middle product”, ie between an inlay and a metal tag, of what’s existing today, that could potentially be disposable and serve the mass market for tracking metal assets. Something that can easily fit into existing conversion processes with minor modifications and jump-start new markets to adopt RFID or incentivize the shift of early adopters to the majority.
I remembered vividly the summer of 2010, Drew Nathanson, Vice President, Auto ID at VDC Research, over the phone said, “We’ve just concluded a study and the market has indicated Consumer Electronics is looking to adopt RFID for Product Authentication at an accelerated scale within the next few years”. At that time, when the idea of a metal label came about within Xerafy, the Engineering team just laughed it off as it’s against the norm and the Science out there! However, the market requirement never went away and so the idea never really went awayas well. We kept challenging Engineering to relook and rethink this and around late last year, they finally had a break-though, discovering a new way around conventional RF design to disrupt the metal tag. We never looked back since.
With 6 patents pending, Metal Skin will undoubtedly open up a whole new floodgate of applications for our customers, converter partners and solution providers, enabling them to provide converted labels that can now be RFID-enabled for metals for product authentication, high-value asset tracking, laptop tracking and the global courier supply chain. Indeed, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
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