 Hello everyone, my name is Lu Yun Jiang. I'm a technology analyst from ID TechX. Today we're very happy to have Steve from RAN IFID with us to tell more about the organizations and IFID technologies. So Steve, over to you to introduce yourself. Yeah, thanks very much. I'm Steve Halliday, I'm the president of the RAN RFID Alliance. The Alliance is an organization put together to help market RAN RFID, that is passive UHF RFID. We currently have about 160 members worldwide in the Alliance and they cover all aspects of the technology from the chip tag, excuse me, the tag chip manufacturers through reader manufacturers, systems integrators, solution providers and end users, an important part of what we're trying to do. So we know RFID is a technology that has been massively used in the e-passports and the bank cards. So what is the new market segment now we see recently? So the nice thing about RAN RFID, it's a technology that has lots of different applications. The ability to go with a technology that reads over large distances up to 15 meters means we can get involved in applications in all sorts of ways. So one of the things that's really hot right now is the retail apparel industry. This industry is growing dramatically and we see many retail stores using RAN RFID tags on all of the goods in their stores. But other areas where RAN is growing fast include aviation. IATA has recently passed a resolution that says that all airline bag tags will include RAN RFID tags in 2020. So that will mean a rapid growth in the use of the technology as we move forward. We also have applications in food management where food is tracked all the way from the farm, all the way through to the store that sells it so that they know the history of the food, they know where it came from, and if in the cases of recall is necessary, then they can easily encompass that. We know that for food industry it's important to know where they are and also what's more important is the temperature and humidity and things. So I know that you have a new chance that's trying to put sensor together with your technology, isn't it? So what's the advancement of it? So that's exactly right. RAN RFID has the ability not only to uniquely identify things, but RAN chips can include a bus interface on the chip, on the tag, so that it can talk to sensors like temperature and pressure, humidity, and provide information about that food. One of the members of the RAN Alliance here on the RAN Pavilion at this show is doing exactly that, and we can talk to them. Sure, come on around the corner and we'll talk to Infratap. Gary. I'm Gary Saxer, Chief Evangelist for Infratap. We make sensor tags, temperature sensing tags. The temperature sensor communicates with the RAN and the NFC chips in order to be able to communicate the answer to the question, how fresh is the product being monitored? The idea is to be able to take and know what the temperature is, know what's going on. As you can see over here, there's a variety of numbers. This is the amount of freshness remaining in that product. This one at 81 is quite fresh. This one at 50, something happened to it. By giving you the answer to the question, how fresh is it, this is a unique solution. Rather than get tremendous amounts of data, we get one piece of information, how fresh in it, and then you can make actions depending on that particular product. So how do you supply the power for the sensor and how many different technology you put here to communicate? This tag contains one battery in it. The battery powers the sensor, not the RFID chips. This has two RFID chips, a RAIN and an NFC chip inside of it, so that you can use the phone and the built-in application that we have on the phone, or you can use, of course, a long-distance RFID antenna to do that. Let's see if we can reach out here. We're gonna take our application called FreshTime Mobile. FreshTime Mobile is available on the Android App Store. FreshTime Mobile can be used in order to be able to grab data off of a specific tag here. And so let's go out here and take a look at this particular tag. You can see that we look for the, in this case, the NFC antenna, and this is telling us the temperature, how many alerts have happened here, and what's going on inside this tag. The idea is that you get the answer to your question, how fresh is the product? How much shelf life remains in the product without having to download a tremendous amount of data? Now, if you want to get a tremendous amount of data, you can, and the tag can provide that for you, but if you just want the answer to hundreds or dozens of tags at a time, just using the answer of the number of fresh time points gives you the answer of what you wanted. Okay, great. My pleasure. Thank you, Steve. We'll move on now and see some of the other vendors who are here on the range of earlier. NetCard is here and Martin is gonna talk to us a little bit about tag packaging. Yeah, hello, y'all. We are NetCards. We are based in the Netherlands. We have our clean room facility factory in the Netherlands, but also in Shanghai, China, and sales office in Singapore. Our background is in IC packaging, IC module assembly, including testing and personalization. So you probably recognize a smart card, for instance, with a gold-plated module inside. We produce that, we make that based on the wafers we receive from our customers. We get the ICs and we put them inside wire bonding, et cetera. But we do more. We are also into RFID. RFID, we do transponder, antenna and tag. This is an example of that. But after this, and the main reason we are here, is also to show our possibilities to do IC packaging around UHF, RAIN RFID, or UHF RFID in general, or HF, where we have designed together also partly with our partners a package for RFID ICs. So it's a product we have today and that we also sell to the market, so you can purchase this directly from us. What is it and what is the purpose? Basically, I can best show you with this, and then you come to the conclusion that you hardly see anything. Well, that's exactly the idea with RFID and that's also exactly the idea to show you how tiny this is. So what I see here, what you see here is an empty PCB and on the PCB, you basically see a black dot. That black dot here compared to a match is a packaged IC, so inside this package there is a chip, a UHF RFID chip. At this stage, we use Impinch and NXP and together with the antenna, you have the capability now to make any device RFID traceable or you can authenticate a product during its life cycle, the sort of complete product life cycle. That's a little bit the idea. Yeah, welcome. So we'll move on round and Taro's going to talk to us a little bit here about Denso and their readers and what they can do for us. So Denso is a Japanese automotive components manufacturer. That's what we have before, but one of the Denso division manufacturers, RFID readers, scanners and the held RFID scanners. We have compact size, portable, but stationary scanners as well. It connects to either, nope, it's sleep. Notice that this is your RFID tag, right? But it doesn't look like one. It just looks like the normal one we have in the product. Oh, yes, right, yeah. Okay, so those are tags put on the shirt, but we don't do the tags. We make scanners or readers. So this is for POS, you know. And you put this and then it shows up. We'll put it on the POS screen. Mix it fast, eliminating the waiting line at the cashier. So what's the main difference between each devices? Like what's the difference between the readers? Oh, so this is for the retail store application, right? But these are in warehouse, a vacuum, inventory count. So it's more powerful. Oh, yeah. Okay, all right, well, thank you. Thank you, Taro. Now, we'll move over to Voyantic, who specialize in quality control of RFID systems and quality measurements. Timo, will tell us a little bit about the Voyantic services. Yeah. Yes, hi. I'm Teemu from Voyantic, and we specialize in quality and performance testing of RFID and NFC from R&D to manufacturing. So we have products for R&D quality testing. So and then the designers would use our equipment in their R&D labs to verify the designs and we finalize the designs, make it optimal for each application. Then in the manufacturing side, each of those billions of RFID decks that are being manufactured, our testers test that every one of those individual RFID labels actually work as specified. So we're all about the quality and performance of the RFID. So you test each of them. So how do you do it? Well, in a video, you actually see one example. So typical way that decks are manufactured, they are in rolls. So the labels on rolls and you just run it through the reel-to-reel machine and while it's running in high speeds, we can actually determine that they work. So we're actually, we're communicating with each deck on very high speed and that way determining that it's working correctly as specified. So how many percentage of the one work and the one failed briefly? Typically coming out of the production line, it's 99.9 something percent are good. But in most applications, or a lot of applications, you need 100% healthcare being one example. If there is a failing deck, it can be a big risk. Another good example is marathon races. It's not a health risk or, but if a deck or where the timing is based on marathon races doesn't work, someone does it get timed. So it would be very annoying. They need 100%. So that's why we need to fix that point, something percentage or that fail. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, team. So we'll go on round and our next vendor on the Pavilion is a secure tag and Shelton's going to tell us a little bit about the services that they offer. All right. So SHU is an I-5D touch boundary manufacturer in Taiwan. The core technology in SHU is we have a BT to design and fine tune the antennas in different scenarios. Such as, everybody knows that UHF frequency is very sensitive to the metals, liquids, stick to the body and we have a solution in design fine tune of antenna and frequency in order to adapt the environment like dense metal environments, metal environments, liquid solutions, stick to the body. If you put this wristband onto the body, you can see three meters of re-range. We also have the product energy harvesting function that will initiate harvesting the power from the reader and it gives the power to the any sensors or LED lights here to initiate the function of the sensor itself. So SAG place ourselves as a transponder solution provided in I-5D and to produce customers different specs of niche in different applications. Thank you. I'm particularly interested in this one. You said you do the energy harvesting. Right, we do. So what type of technology you use and how you store it, the energy and you use it for the LED light. Is it enough to support a sensor? It is. We will design this antenna and we will make sure there's enough energy that we have from the readers. It gives the power all the way to the sensors or any LED lights will initiate the power to turn on the functionality of the sensor itself or LED lights as well. The other thing I'm interested to say is you have different distance, three meter, nine meter, how you tune it. Right, so we design antennas and we give the re-range when the liquid or the body will attach to the text. Sometimes this text will be influenced by the body water. UHF frequency, nobody doesn't do well with the water. But we found a solution to design the antennas and fight it out to accommodate with the water solution. In that way, this text, UHF range text, still works well. So normally this nine meters in here, if you stick to the water you will still have a centimeter of a re-range. This tag here, tag into the body, it gives you three meters. So you will be able to track people by wearing this wristband of re-range tags. Okay, so this one can be used underwater as well? Yes, accommodate the water, not even water, but attach to the human body and attach to the bottle of liquid stuff. Okay, very interesting. Yes? Thank you, Shao. Thank you, Steve. So next on our list is Marata. Marata specializes in very, very small tags. So Jerry's going to talk to us a little bit about how those small tags can be used in specialist applications. Jerry. Yep. Just want to make sure I get this. Hi, I'm Jerry Ebers with Marata Electronics. What makes Marata a little bit unique for the RFID and NSC technologies is the size and dimensions of our physical tags. So this particular example, as we presented earlier today, is the small physical size of the actual components that we do versus the traditional type of inlay products. Traditional type of inlay is roughly three to four inches where the Marata tag is quite a bit unique as far as the physical size. Same industry standards, physically different sizes and physically for different applications. The re-range on the traditional tag is somewhere in the range of four to maybe seven meters. Smaller individual tags are typically used in applications that are roughly one centimeter. So in this particular case, we're able to re-use and communicate these particular tags and we can send the information using a small tag after it's been embedded possibly into... So we're able to see the embedded tag we're using in the actual unit. Basically, scan that and from the information, we actually can pull the serial number into the database. So what's the technology and what's the new technique you use to make it so small? You're not as a great packaging company, so we're using our ceramic substrate material and we basically do the coil pattern of the antenna into the ceramic substrate, do a flip chip die and then cover with resin epoxy so we can basically package in very, very small packages similar to what you see here. We have variations of it as well. So apart from glasses, what's the other applications for it? Because they are very small, so I can easily see if these could be embedded in many, many different... Yeah, that's a very good point because that's some of the discussion we had earlier at the earlier this afternoon. The applications are basically anything that cannot use an inlay, something of a large tag cannot be used on an application like this. These are also permanent, so these devices are inserted and they're permanent to the actual device. So it could be lipstick, it could be consumer products, it could be medical, health wear, test vials, any type of medical application as well. Something that needs a permanent identification and using a Raynor RFID tag. Okay, the other thing is like, it's so small that how much it is for each of the tags? The cost? Where the cost? The pricing, I prefer not to get into the pricing. They're more costly than the traditional type inlays. Inlays are very inexpensive because this is kind of the highest volume that's in the industry. This is a little bit more niche, so our market is certainly a lot smaller, so we're not able to get the same cost in this particular device. Yeah, one question for you. Yes. So for some security reason, like easy, all the different reader could read all the RFID tag or they can be... It's a really good question and so the basic air interface standards that we've set up allows for any reader to read any tag that is working with that air interface standard. However, we've also built into the standard the ability to include security so we can actually make it so that a tag will only talk to a reader that it's supposed to talk to. So they authenticate to each other and then it will only talk to this. This means if a bad guy comes along and wants to read tags, he won't necessarily be able to do that because he won't be able to authenticate his reader to those tags. Okay. So our next company that we're going to talk to is Aware Innovations. Where is the solutions provider, providing software and solutions and Bar Ivy is going to talk to us a little bit about some of the things that they can do. Bar, if you'd like to give us a little overview of what Aware does. Hi, how are you doing? So Aware Innovations, we're a system integrator. We provide customers with engineering support to determine what type of technologies to implement in their process and to help them connect that information, collect the data for that. So we have a mobile application that helps connect things and things that can vary from computers, from basically anything that you can tag. So your purse, your shoes, all can be tagged for various reasons and tracked individually or in lots, conditions and what we do is help build that solution together. My job as the chief solution officer is work with companies. I just recently worked with a company to who makes a toothpaste and we were designing them a solution to provide real time tracking of components contained for traceability and for location so that they'll be able to integrate that into their overall manufacturing process. At 6PM, as the common sessions will resume until 6PM, but the exhibition is now closing. From all of us at IK TechX, thank you for joining us. See you next year and thank you for your support. So from your point of view, what is the main difficulty for a customer to adapt this technology? Really, the most difficulty that the customers have is really not there, because it's easily adaptable, but it all comes around them understanding what their return on investment is. So that's really them understanding that they need to define what it is that they want to achieve and what the problems are that they want to eliminate and turn that into a return on investment so you know how much you want to expend because you can go, for example, the US Patent and Trademark Office here, the IT asset management, they invested $3 million and today they're saving a million dollars every year over implementing this technology. Huge investment up front, but they realized that there was a return on investment, you know, basically two and three quarters of a year, they were able to recoup all that and now every year is basically a savings of a million bucks. Thanks, Bob, we really appreciate it, thank you. So we'll go over to one more today that is Teslanix. Paul Slavia will talk to you a little bit about a new way of using RFID readers with Rain RFID. Yes, what we, hello. What we're presenting here is a new type of a reader which is a distributed reader system. The way it works is we deploy a few of them, they work together and the end result is that you get transferred about 10 times more power to Rain RFID tags or other endpoints such as, for example, battery fee sensors. So we are able to reach out much farther and use far fewer devices to achieve better results. And the applications take us away from inventory but also include IoT sensors and ability to get sensory information, for example, temperature measurements, humidity, vibration and what have you from devices which are basically unpowered, they have no batteries, no wires or anything. So it's a pretty amazing new technology which is going to be widely deployed and will possibly revolutionize the whole rain world. Yeah, actually I want to know more about it. So the whole system don't have a battery so it's still a passive RFID. That's passive RFID, the device is the RFID tags as standard tags, passive, right? It could be also RFID integrated sensors without power, without batteries. Because our system delivers 10 times more power from a fixed infrastructure, so we illuminate those tags or sensors, wakes them up and lets them to do some useful functions such as, for example, transmitting back the ID information or transmitting sensory information from the environment. That's how it works. Okay, so how about the reader? So the reader is like the typical RFID reader that you carry around or it's like station. No, it's a special, it's a fixed infrastructure reader, and so they have special sauce that makes it all possible so you end up with 10 times more power. So you can use far fewer of those devices to cover large areas. So what's the distance? Well, we can go about five times the distance of alternative existing technologies and we can use far fewer of the devices so you can have significant cost savings about at least half price for a complete solution. No wires, no power. I'm very excited. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. You're welcome. Done? So, yeah, so you got a chance to see a flavor of some of the things that is happening in the rain RFID world. There are many other companies, both here and members of the Alliance that are doing equally innovative stuff, and we hope that you guys will all come along and join and see what we're doing in a different day. So how do you think about the market in five years or even 10 years? Do you think, yeah, so what's your opinion on RFID markets going to be in five years? So I think we're seeing such strong growth at the moment that although it's very hard to predict, we talk about the fact that in 2017, we delivered about 12.8 billion rain tags into the marketplace. By 2020, we think we'll easily be delivering over 20 billion tags a year, and that doesn't include some of the big projects that are coming up. With IATA mandating rain tags in bag tags, that will add another four billion a year to those numbers. So in five to 10 years, there's just going to be a massive increase in the amount of rain RFID in the town. We really are providing the main endpoint for the internet of things. Almost everything that is not a smart thing already will become smart with the use of rain RFID. Last question is, how do you enjoy the IDTAC show this year? So, yeah, it's been a great show. We've had some good visitors, we've had some end users, we've had quite a few startup companies have stopped by to try and find out more about the technology. And we've had companies that we didn't really think were going to be involved in our technology who've asked a lot of questions. So it's been a great show for us. We really enjoyed being here. Thank you very much for coming this year. Thank you very much. It was a great show.