Pink Tenticle (a blog dedicated to all things Japanese) recently wrote of a development by Hitachi of minute RFID chips smaller than a hair is thin. The company has been working on small RFID chips that can be embedded in paper for authentication of tickets and even money. These new chips are even smaller.
I can see a time where we will regularly tagged as we walk along a street or enter a building (no more inky stamps on our hands when we leave a club), our food will contain them, our cloths will have them in the very fibres they are manufactured from and our shoes will betray our movements on floor sensors as we walk on the ground.
This is the technology that will bring Orwell’s dystopia not the visible cameras we see on every street today. The real monitoring will be insidious, connected, omnipresent and undetected. Cameras will dissapear from our buildings as the information grid grows and their functionality and use diminishes. There’s a new kid in town.
Perhaps the market to be in for the future will be that of detection and device destruction. Willam Gibson’s Neuromancer vision of scanning for electronic devices before meeting or talking will come true.
The science of scrambling RF signals and EM-pulse to eradicate our bodies of the tags will blossom in the next 5-10 years, portable EMP devices to sweep our clothes and bodies after a day in the city will become as normal as showers to wash our hair or clean our skin of dirt.
Cough. Anyway here’s the article:
RFID keeps getting smaller. On February 13, Hitachi unveiled a tiny, new “powder” type RFID chip measuring 0.05 x 0.05 mm — the smallest yet — which they aim to begin marketing in 2 to 3 years.
By relying on semiconductor miniaturization technology and using electron beams to write data on the chip substrates, Hitachi was able to create RFID chips 64 times smaller than their currently available 0.4 x 0.4 mm mu-chips. Like mu-chips, which have been used as an anti-counterfeit measure in admission tickets, the new chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38-digit ID number.
The new chips are also 9 times smaller than the prototype chips Hitachi unveiled last year, which measure 0.15 x 0.15 mm.
At 5 microns thick, the RFID chips can more easily be embedded in sheets of paper, meaning they can be used in paper currency, gift certificates and identification. But since existing tags are already small enough to embed in paper, it leads one to wonder what new applications the developers have in mind.
[Source: Fuji Sankei/Pink Tenticle]
