Dresden Firm Develops Battery-Powered ‘Smart Labels’ That Can Monitor Your Package

The familiar bar code has a smarter cousin called “smart labels.” A Dresden company called KSW Microtec GmbH has come up with electronic tags that can store large amounts of information about the contents of a package and can even monitor the temperature of packages of blood as it is being shipped.

“We can produce 10,000 smart labels an hour,” says Dr. Thomas Seidowski, Managing Director of KSW Microtec.

“It only a few cents to produce a passive label and the information on them is very secure.”

KSW Microtec, working together with an Israeli company called Power Paper Ltd., maker of flexible, ultra-thin printable batteries, last year unveiled a smart label that enables the monitoring of temperature data so that a record can be kept of what sensitive goods have been exposed to during shipping. By using these labels data can be transferred to a scanning device on a decentralized basis, without any visual contact and with high recording capacity.

The battery is not yet rechargeable, but it possesses a two-and-a-half-year shelf life, a 20 mAh per square inch capacity, and can be manufactured for only a few cents.

Credit cards equipped with a thin-screen that could display account information are a potential application. In addition, the technology is being applied to the food industry, logistics and medical technology.

The label includes a chip, the Power Paper battery, a temperature sensor and a radio frequency antenna and a transponder. "We need the battery to start the operation, for sensing, and to store data," Dr. Seidowski says. The chip is programmed to check the temperature at intervals, and the information is communicated by the radio frequency interface.

"We are using the transponder interface to talk with the chip, to load software to it and to read the history of transportation and storage," he says. "For this we must have a power supply integrated on the chip."

Dr. Seidowski is a former professor who earned his PhD in the field of flip chip technology.

Flip chip microelectronic assembly is the direct electrical connection of face-down (hence, “flipped) components on circuit boards or substrates by means of conductive bumps on the chip bod pads. Most electronic watches, and many cellular phones, pagers and high speed processors are assembled with flip chip technology.

After completing his post-doctorate studies in Russia, Dr. Seidowski decided back in 1994 to start his own company out of his Dresden basement. He found a patent-free technology to develop and eventually formed a partnership with a man from Boston.

Today, KSW Microtec is Europe's first service supplier of Polymer Flip Chip technology. Although passive smart labels are the biggest contributor to sales, Dr. Seidowski foresees active smart labels as becoming the company’s core product. For further information, see www.ksw-microtec.de.—