NFC is the short-range, 13.56 MHz HF flavour of RFID that every modern smartphone can read without any extra hardware, which is what makes it the default choice for consumer-facing product authentication. The company says it builds both the hardware and the software, using radio frequency alone to certify that a product is unique, and that the approach scales from a few hundred pieces a year to millions. Everything below is drawn from Autentico’s own product page as of September 2026, and the company publishes no independent test results, so treat the claims as vendor statements rather than verified performance.

The label is made smart before it reaches the bottling line

The most practical idea in the system is also the least glamorous one. Rather than asking a producer to redesign packaging or bolt a tag applicator onto an existing line, Autentico asks the customer to post in their existing reels of adhesive labels. The company runs them through what it calls an Insert Label Machine, which places a tag into each label, and sends the reels back. The labels then go through the same labelling head they always did. The company says the customer does not have to change their production process at all, and that it can handle any type of paper adhesive label reel.

Autentico calls the result an “etichetta parlante”, a talking label, built around what it names a DNA Tag: the idea being that the product speaks for itself rather than relying on a certificate in a drawer somewhere. For a small winery or a single-estate oil producer, avoiding a capital purchase and a line change is often the difference between doing a traceability project and shelving one.

Wine, oil, shoes and the awkward case of metal

The applications the company lists map onto the sectors where Italian provenance carries the biggest price premium. On wine bottles the tag sits inside the adhesive label, protected from handling and from the wet, cold conditions of a chiller but still readable through the paper. On olive oil the argument is about substantiating a specific claim: organic certification, or a particular pressing method, tied to the individual bottle rather than to a batch code. On shoes, Autentico says artisanal production can be protected and the process automated to the point of recording photographs of the manufacturing steps, so the buyer can see the shoes being made.

Metal boxes get their own entry, and the company is right to flag it as a special case. Metal detunes an HF antenna and can kill a read outright, so tagging metal products means selecting a tag built with a ferrite layer or an on-metal construction rather than reaching for a standard inlay. Autentico says tagging metal requires care both in choosing the correct tag and in managing the stored data.

The named customers indicate the end of the market being targeted. Cantina Santadi is a co-operative winery founded in 1960 in the Sulcis region of south west Sardinia, with around 200 member growers farming over 650 hectares, and is widely regarded as the benchmark producer of Carignano del Sulcis. Dal Forno Romano is a Valpolicella estate at Cellore d’Illasi in Veneto, making wine under that name since 1983 and treated by collectors as a reference point for Amarone. Also listed are Colle Massari, where Autentico says it applies and reads HF NFC tags on wooden crates including non-standard sizes, the citrus grower Arance Campanella, the pasta producer Amandafood, Sterylab, and unnamed high-end electronics manufacturers.

Reading the map, not just the tag

The geolocation piece is what separates this from a simple authenticity check. Autentico says that when a tag is read, the platform records the product’s position in real time, and that producers can view georeferenced reads through a web back end where they also manage product cards and distributors. That turns an anti-counterfeiting tool into a distribution-control tool: if bottles allocated to one national distributor keep being tapped in a different country, the brand owner has evidence of parallel trade rather than a suspicion. For premium drinks and footwear brands, grey market leakage is frequently a larger and more constant financial problem than outright forgery.

What an NFC tag can and cannot prove

It is worth being precise about what consumer tap-to-verify demonstrates, because the marketing around it is often looser than the engineering. A tag that simply returns a static serial number can be read by anyone with a phone and written to a blank tag, so a plain UID proves very little on its own. Robust schemes use cryptographic authentication in the chip, the best known approach being the secure unique NFC message, where the tag computes a fresh message authentication code on every tap using a key that never leaves the silicon, so a URL replayed from a cloned tag fails verification at the server.

Autentico’s page does not name a chip, a standard or an authentication method, so there is no way to tell from it which of these approaches is in use, and readers evaluating the system should ask. One clue cuts both ways: the company says Autentico NFC can identify an original product with no internet connection. Offline verification is genuinely useful in a cellar or a warehouse with poor signal, but it means the check is being made inside the app rather than against a server, which is a meaningfully different security model and one that needs care in how keys and revocation are handled.

Why this is being sold in Italy first

The commercial backdrop is severe. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming association, put the damage from counterfeit and imitation Italian food at around 42 billion euros in figures reported in June 2026, of which roughly 40 billion relates to Italian-sounding food produced in the United States and about 2 billion to outright counterfeits of Italian products. Olive oil and wine are perennial targets precisely because origin is the product.

Regulation is heading the same way. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the 2025 to 2030 working plan gives 2027 as the indicative year for adopting the ecodesign measure covering textiles, apparel and footwear, with Digital Product Passport obligations following roughly 18 months after a delegated act enters into force. Producers already carrying a unique, item-level digital identity on each product will start that work from a better position than those who are not. Autentico also sells a companion product it calls Autentico CHAIN for distribution using RFID, along with HF and UHF tunnels, handheld and tablet readers and UHF gates. More on tagging at the pack and item level is collected in the smart packaging and NFC sections.

Read more at https://prodottoautentico.it/anticontraffazione-vino-moda-olio-nfc/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Pragmatic designs and manufactures FlexICs, ultra-thin flexible integrated circuits built on a thin-film process on a flexible substrate rather than conventional bulk silicon CMOS. That process difference is the basis of the company’s claims on cost, cycle time and environmental impact. Its RFID relevant products are NFC Connect, a near-field connectivity line launched in March 2025 for item-level intelligence in mass-market goods, and NFC Protect, a tamper detection part used in applications such as anti-counterfeiting for cosmetics. Both are made at Pragmatic Park in Meadowfield, County Durham, which houses the UK’s first 300mm semiconductor fabrication line and is intended to become the highest-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility in the UK, with capacity to produce billions of chips a year. The company also runs R&D and production at Sedgefield.

A fab operations career, aimed at ramp

Dr James is a PhD-trained physicist with 25 years in the semiconductor sector, covering fab operations, technology transfers, industrialisation and business transformation, plus senior roles in engineering, commercial strategy and site leadership. He spent his most recent 10 years as Managing Director of Vishay Newport Limited, formerly Nexperia, where he led the site’s move from IDM to independent foundry. An IDM, or integrated device manufacturer, designs and makes its own chips end to end; an independent foundry instead manufactures wafers to order for other companies’ designs, which is a different commercial and operational discipline. He also restructured the site’s commercial and operational capabilities. Earlier senior technical and operational roles span MAX I.E.G, Plessey Semiconductors and Zarlink Semiconductor.

David Moore, CEO of Pragmatic Semiconductor, said: “I am delighted to welcome Paul to Pragmatic. His depth of high-volume semiconductor manufacturing and operational leadership, together with his experience of successfully leading complex industrial transformation, makes him an outstanding addition to our leadership team. Paul joins at an important point in our continued growth to lead our manufacturing operations at Pragmatic Park, our flagship production site in the North East of England, as we expand capacity, strengthen operational excellence and scale our unique and sustainable manufacturing to meet increasing global customer demand.”

James said: “I am thrilled to be joining the Pragmatic team at such an exciting time in its 16-year journey. The innovative flexible semiconductor 300mm technology is truly revolutionary with many advantages over standard Silicon processing including cost, cycle time and environmental impact. I look forward to working with the talented team to accelerate the next phase of growth and technology development in the UK’s only 300mm semiconductor fab.”

Following the ramp-up phase

James succeeds Shane Geary, who held the role for nearly three years and oversaw the official opening of the site and the ramp of high-volume manufacturing and production. Pragmatic framed the handover as the start of a phase focused on scaling capacity to meet customer demand, which reads as a shift of emphasis from getting a new fab running to getting more chips out of it.

The capacity behind that ambition was funded in December 2023, when Pragmatic raised GBP 162 million. The UK Infrastructure Bank, now the National Wealth Fund, provided GBP 60 million of direct equity alongside M&G’s Catalyst, Northern Gritstone, LocalGlobe, Evolution Partners, British Patient Capital, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Prosperity7 Ventures. The expansion was expected to support or create 500 highly skilled jobs. On 26 August 2026 the company’s NFC product portfolio took the RFID Product Gold Prize at the IOTE 2026 Innovation Awards.

More coverage of near-field products and the companies making them is in our NFC and manufacturer sections.

Read more at https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/09/08/3357315/0/en/pragmatic-semiconductor-appoints-dr-paul-james-as-executive-vice-president-manufacturing-operations.html

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The timing needs stating carefully. As of early September 2026, METRO’s own Tap2Cruz page still gives the launch as Summer 2026 and describes the system in the future tense, and its fares and passes page repeats that wording. No dated go live announcement had been published at the time of writing, so Summer 2026 is the operator’s stated window rather than a confirmed switch on date.

What riders get

The regular contactless fare is USD 2 for unlimited systemwide travel for up to two hours, with a discount fare of USD 1 for eligible riders. Contactless enabled Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express cards are accepted, along with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay and Fitbit Pay. Cash and the existing Splash Pass mobile ticketing both remain in service. Each rider must tap separately, so a single card or phone cannot be used to pay for a group.

The paper pass range is shrinking around the launch. METRO’s fares page states that from 1 July 2026 the 3-Day, 7-Day and 15-Ride passes are no longer sold, although passes bought on or before 30 June 2026 stay valid until 31 December 2026.

Account based ticketing is the real change

The interesting part of a rollout like this is not the tap, it is what happens after it. Tap2Cruz is account based ticketing, which means the card or phone presented at the reader carries no ticket and no stored value. It supplies a payment token that acts purely as an identifier. The validator authorises the rider onboard in a fraction of a second, then the taps are collected and priced in the back office afterwards, against an account held for that card.

That ordering is what makes fare capping possible. METRO says a daily cap prevents riders being overcharged across multiple trips, and that a 31 day cap runs on a rolling basis from the rider’s first tap rather than from the start of a calendar month. Because pricing happens after travel, the rider never has to decide in advance whether a pass is worth buying: they tap, and the back office charges the lower of pay as you go and the equivalent pass price. Card based systems could not do this, because the fare product had to be loaded onto the card first.

Littlepay, the transit payments processor behind the deployment, handles that fare calculation and gives riders a Traveller Portal in which to review their charges.

What the tap actually is

Contactless EMV payment runs over ISO/IEC 14443 at 13.56 MHz, the same HF proximity interface used by NFC, with an intended read range of a couple of centimetres. It is a different technology family from the UHF RAIN RFID found in retail stock counting and logistics, which operates around 860 to 960 MHz and reads at metres. Anyone specifying transit validators is buying short range HF proximity hardware, and that short range is a security feature rather than a limitation.

On security, METRO states that transactions use EMV chip technology with a one time code generated for each transaction, so intercepted data cannot simply be replayed. The agency also states that personal data will never be stored, sold or given away by METRO or any third party agent, and that card issuers see only the transaction amount, not the rider’s travel history.

Concessions verified through Cal-ITP

Discounted contactless fares will be available to adults aged 65 and over, veterans and Medicare cardholders, verified through CalITP Benefits. Cal-ITP is the California Integrated Travel Project, a Caltrans led programme that helps transit agencies adopt contactless payment, automate discounts and standardise their data. Its Benefits service digitises eligibility checking, so a rider proves entitlement once and links it to their own payment card, after which the discount is applied automatically at the reader with nothing to show the driver.

Where this sits in the statewide rollout

Cal-ITP’s Mobility Marketplace lets California’s 300 plus transit agencies buy contactless fare collection off pre negotiated statewide Master Service Agreements arranged through the Department of General Services, avoiding a full procurement each time. Littlepay holds one of those agreements as a transit processor. The same marketplace lists acquirers Elavon and Fiserv, and validator suppliers INIT, Kuba and Aurionpro. METRO has not publicly named the validator supplier for Tap2Cruz.

Monterey-Salinas Transit was the first agency in California to go live with open loop contactless, in early 2021. Redding Area Bus Authority launched its Tap2Ride option in April 2026 and was described at the time as the ninth transit agency in the state to join the Cal-ITP Benefits platform. Streetsblog California reported in May 2026 that once LA Metro’s TAP Plus service launches, contactless payment will be available on the agencies that carry roughly 95 per cent of public transit trips in California, while noting that in absolute numbers more agencies still do not accept it than do. Santa Cruz METRO is one of the operators closing that gap.

For comparison, see our coverage of RATP’s open loop NFC payment rollout in Paris and St. Louis MetroLink’s NFC fare gates, or browse the full contactless payment archive.

Read more at https://scmetro.org/tap2cruz/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

On the face of it that is a merchandising story rather than an RFID one. It is worth a second look. An electronic shelf label, or ESL, is a battery powered e-paper display with a radio on board, individually addressed from a central price system. An estate of 1.2 million of them is an estate of 1.2 million wireless endpoints on UK shelf edges, and on this particular label family there is an optional passive high frequency tag sitting alongside the radio.

What is actually on the shelf edge

The hardware comes from VusionGroup, the French listed retail digitalisation business formerly known as SES-imagotag, which says it serves more than 350 large retailer groups across Europe, Asia and North America. Asda has standardised on the 2.6 inch VUSION shelf edge label, one of the common sizes across the V100 and V300 series, so the model chosen sits in the mainstream of that range rather than at either extreme. Grocery Gazette reported better screen quality and readability as a factor in the choice.

Price data does not reach those labels over shop Wi-Fi. The VUSION family communicates on a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, bidirectional, using up to 11 channels, with radio coverage of roughly 25 metres from an in-store access point and 128-bit AES encryption with secure key exchange. Because the link is two way, a label confirms what it has been sent, which is how a retailer can be confident that the price on the shelf matches the price at the till. Each label also carries a blinking LED pick-to-light function, used for picking and for locating stock on a shelf.

Where NFC comes into it

That 2.4 GHz link is proprietary radio and not RFID in the sense most readers of this site use the word. The NFC option is a different matter. SES-imagotag labels can be ordered with an integrated passive NFC tag that complies with ISO 14443 and operates at 13.56 MHz, the standard HF RFID band. ISO 14443 is the four part international standard for proximity cards and their reader interface at that frequency, and it is the same air interface used by contactless bank cards and transit tickets, with a working range of a few centimetres.

Tap an NFC capable phone on a label that has the chip fitted and it redirects to https://nfc.ses-imagotag.com/<Label-ID>, so the tag resolves to that individual label’s identity rather than to a generic product page. Antenna position varies with label size, so the phone has to be lined up with the antenna rather than waved at the display in general. VusionGroup’s own product material pitches the shopper use case directly, describing labels that can be tapped or scanned to reach product reviews, nutritional scores, stock availability in nearby stores or alternative formats online.

One caveat matters here, and it is the honest way to report it. Neither Asda nor VusionGroup has stated publicly whether the NFC chip is populated in the specific 2.6 inch units Asda has deployed. The tag is a documented option on this label family, not a confirmed feature of this rollout. What the rollout does establish is the scale of the opportunity: a UK retailer specifying that option across an estate of this size would put an HF tag population in the millions onto shelf edges in a single programme. Further background on the technology sits in our NFC coverage.

What the labels do for the stores

The displays carry pricing, unit cost, weight and promotional information, and they also show ingredient and allergen information for customers, with expanded detail on bakery items where that has historically been awkward to print at the shelf edge. The operational case is the removal of manual repricing.

Matt Harrison, Director of Asda Express Central Operations, said in the September 2026 announcement: “By removing manual pricing tasks, we’re freeing up time for colleagues to focus on serving customers and keeping store standards high.” Roy Horgan, UK and Ireland CEO at VusionGroup, said the company was “proud to have reached this milestone with Asda” and expected to build on the partnership.

This is the end of a staged programme rather than a single push. An earlier phase announced on 3 October 2025 covered 250 Express stores at roughly 2,800 labels per store, more than 700,000 digital shelf displays in total. That phase followed a three month trial at Oxford Road in Manchester, with Castleford the first new-build Express to open with labels fitted from day one, and 20 further Express stores due to open before the end of 2025 with the labels in place at launch.

Who delivered it, and why the store count varies

Renovotec, a UK integrator specialising in rugged mobile computing and RF infrastructure, handled delivery and installation. HL Display supplied the rails and holders that physically carry the labels on shelves, baskets, hooks, chillers and freezers, an attachment supplier rather than a technology partner. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, reporting on 30 August 2026 from a LinkedIn post about the project, named a wider supplier list, adding Elecomm, MADIC UK and Evolve on infrastructure, with Daniel Pelissier as project lead.

That RTIH report puts the figure at more than 550 sites rather than 517, because it counts the Asda petrol station estate as well as the Express stores. The two numbers are counting different things rather than contradicting each other: 517 is the Express store figure in Asda’s own announcement. Anthony McCarron, Projects, Propositions and Communications Manager at Asda, described the work as a step change for customers and colleagues, delivered on time and on budget.

Cameras are the next layer

Asda is separately piloting shelf-edge availability cameras in five of its larger main-estate stores. The system identifies gaps, out-of-stocks, low inventory and misplaced products and alerts colleagues to replenish, with a wider rollout planned. That is the computer vision half of the VusionGroup stack, which alongside the labels themselves includes VusionCloud, Captana for computer vision and AI, Memory for data analytics, Engage for retail media and PDi digital signage. For an RFID audience the point is the direction of travel: shelf level identity and shelf level sensing are converging on the same infrastructure.

The wider UK picture

Asda is not alone. Waitrose announced a partnership with SOLUM in December 2025 to introduce electronic shelf labels nationwide, and Co-op has been replacing labels across 2,400 stores through 2026. Between them, UK grocery is quietly building one of the largest deployed populations of addressable, powered devices at the shelf edge anywhere in retail, with an HF tag option available on at least one of the major platforms.

Read more at https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/03/10/asda-rolls-out-new-electronic-shelf-label-across-express-stores

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

By launch day on 25 August 2026, 11,100 people had activated the credential. Fewer than 20% of that summer’s orientation attendees chose to take a physical card at all.

What a mobile BuckID opens and pays for

Ohio State is a public university in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the largest in the United States by enrolment, so a BuckID touches a lot of daily life. The mobile version covers residence hall and academic building access, dining locations, off-campus merchants that accept BuckID, recreation facilities, printing and copying, and timeclocks.

“A BuckID provides access to all kinds of important things at Ohio State,” said Josh Bodnar, director of BuckID. Every Columbus campus building that accepted a physical BuckID was due to accept the mobile credential before the autumn semester started.

The readers were already there

Mobile BuckID is read by the tap-enabled NFC readers already fitted across campus, the same contactless units that read the chip in the physical card. That is the part worth noting for anyone planning a similar project. Ohio State added a tap-to-pay chip to the physical BuckID in 2022, moving the campus from swipe to tap several years before the phone credential arrived, so the mobile rollout did not need a door hardware replacement programme behind it.

As general background, mobile campus credentials in the Apple, Google and Samsung wallets are provisioned as NFC applets inside the phone’s secure element, a tamper-resistant chip kept separate from the main processor, and they are read over the same 13.56 MHz contactless interface as a conventional contactless smart card. Ohio State has not named the credential platform vendor behind Mobile BuckID.

Two features do the practical work of making a phone credible as a door key. Apple’s Express Mode means the device does not need to be unlocked to tap, so a phone pulled from a pocket behaves like a card. Battery Reserve keeps the credential working for several hours after a compatible iPhone or Samsung Galaxy device has powered down on a low battery, which answers the obvious objection that a flat phone locks you out of your own room. Supported hardware includes compatible iPhone models, Apple Watch, eligible Android phones, and Samsung Galaxy devices including Samsung watches.

Activating it, and who cannot

Provisioning runs through the Ohio State app: users open the BuckID section and tap “Ready to Provision”. Two prerequisites have to be in place first, a photo on file, which is reviewed in three to five business days, and multi-factor authentication enabled. Only one credential is active per person, so activating the mobile version deactivates the physical card.

Not everyone at the university could switch. Some people at the Wexner Medical Center and some of the health science colleges were not eligible at launch. Students in fully online programmes and remote employees can use a basic digital BuckID in the Ohio State App instead. The rollout covers the Columbus campus only, with regional campuses planned for 2027.

A year early, and one thing dropping off

The university had originally targeted 2027 for a mobile credential and delivered it a year ahead of that after advocacy from student government. “Mobile is always kind of where we were headed… We have managed to beat that goal by a whole year,” Bodnar said.

One capability is moving in the other direction. Support for physical BuckID cards on COTA, the Central Ohio Transit Authority bus network that serves the Columbus area, ends at the close of 2026. From 2027, riders use either the Ohio State app or a transit card issued by COTA.

Campus and workplace credentials have been one of the steadier drivers of NFC deployment, and more coverage sits in our NFC and access control sections.

Read more at https://news.osu.edu/mobile-buckid-now-available-for-columbus-campus

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The device is deliberately unremarkable. A wristband, a keyfob on a lanyard or a hang tag carries a passive NFC tag. Anyone finding a person who is lost or confused taps a phone against it and sees details supplied by the wearer or their carer: their name, a short message such as “I have dementia”, and an emergency contact number.

The supplier: Lumiio, and the ten years of Seritag behind it

The tags come from Lumiio, the dementia and personal-ID brand launched by Seritag, a UK NFC tag supplier that has been making and encoding NFC tags for over ten years. The two are sister companies, and this is not a product that appeared to chase council budgets. As Seritag puts it, “For over 10 years, our sister company Seritag used their NFC expertise to work supply NFC dementia and essential personal information ID wristbands to police forces and charities across the UK.”

That decade of one-off orders is what Lumiio was built to replace: bespoke batches per force produced inconsistency, awkward information management and patchy device compatibility. Lumiio turned it into a product: a purpose-built range of NFC wearables paired with a free mobile app on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

The range covers wristbands, hang tags, keycards, keyfobs and lanyards in high-visibility yellow, printed with “Dementia Safeguarding”, the NFC mark and the instruction “Scan to help me”. Lumiio’s hosted service holds the wearer’s name, two emergency contacts, diagnoses and communication preferences, with no subscription and unlimited updates, so a change of carer or phone number does not mean a new tag. Tapping works app-free for the finder; the app is only needed for offline access. Lumiio donates GBP 1 per order to charity.

What is actually on the tag

Lumiio products use a genuine NXP NTAG215, a widely used NFC Forum Type 2 tag with 504 bytes of user memory. NFC operates at 13.56 MHz in the HF band, standardised in ISO/IEC 14443 and ISO/IEC 18092, with NDEF the data format that hands a URL or short text block straight to a phone with no app involved. The NTAG215 supports a one-way lock, so the encoded data cannot be casually overwritten. Those 504 bytes are also why the design points at a hosted record rather than trying to hold a full care profile on the chip itself.

Read range is a few centimetres, which in a safeguarding context is a feature rather than a limitation. The tag cannot be read across a room or skimmed in a crowd, so it discloses nothing until someone deliberately holds a phone against it. The tags are passive, drawing all their power from the reading phone’s field, so there is no battery to charge or replace. For a user group who may not reliably charge a device, that matters.

Every current iPhone and Android handset reads NFC tags with nothing installed, which is why the scheme works with a stranger’s phone in the street rather than needing staff with special kit. Set against a GPS or Bluetooth tracker, that means no location tracking, no subscription, no charging and far fewer consent and dignity objections, at the cost of only doing anything once someone has already been approached.

Where the scheme came from

Avon and Somerset Police pioneered the Dementia Safeguarding Scheme and is credited as the originator by every council that has since adopted it, with Inspector Stuart King credited with the initiative and the work dated by Seritag to 2020. It sits alongside the Herbert Protocol, the nationally recognised form on which a person living with dementia or their next of kin records information in advance that police can use if that person goes missing. Seritag reports a 93 per cent success rate for the Avon and Somerset scheme, with only 7 per cent of enrolled individuals having gone missing as of November 2023. That figure comes from the supplier, not an independent evaluation.

The Northern Ireland sequence, then England

Northern Ireland has adopted the model council by council: Ards and North Down in May 2025, Antrim and Newtownabbey in November 2025, Lisburn and Castlereagh in January 2026 and Mid and East Antrim in May 2026. Lichfield District followed in September 2026.

Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council announced its version on 5 January 2026, jointly with its Policing and Community Safety Partnership and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, offering 500 wristbands and hang tags free of charge. Councillor Tim Mitchell, Communities and Wellbeing chairman, noted that “Within Lisburn and Castlereagh our percentage of older residents is increasing”.

Mid and East Antrim Borough Council launched its Dementia Friendly Safeguarding Scheme with the PSNI on 21 May 2026, again using wristbands and hang tags storing emergency contact information, so a tap gives next-of-kin details and the person can be helped home. Councillor Jackson Minford, Mayor of Mid and East Antrim, said “These simple, effective tools empower our communities to become more dementia friendly”. Registration is free through the Dementia Friendly MEA section of the council website.

Lichfield: 2,000 devices, and no central database

The Lichfield devices are free to district residents living with dementia and related conditions, distributed by Grace Cares, a local social enterprise, working with the Alzheimer’s Society, Magnolia Friends and Dementia Support. They can be collected from Grace Cares at Elmhurst Business Park, Monday to Friday, with drop-in sessions at four venues through September 2026. The scheme is backed by the Staffordshire Commissioner and the Lichfield District Community Safety Partnership.

Councillor Richard Cox, Cabinet Member for Community and Public Protection, said “For someone living with dementia, becoming lost or confused can be frightening”, framing the aim as independence with reassurance. Emma Smith of Grace Cares said “This is a simple piece of technology, but it can provide an important extra layer of reassurance”, and that it can help reunite people safely with their carers.

The privacy design is the part other public-sector projects should note. The scheme does not track location, the devices need no charging, and no information is held in any central system. Only essential contact details and a custom message sit on the individual tag.

Taken together, these deployments say something useful about where NFC earns its keep in public services. Nobody is claiming a 13.56 MHz tag solves dementia care. What it does is remove the friction from one moment, the point at which a stranger wants to help and has no way of knowing who to call, using hardware that costs a few pounds and works with the phone already in the finder’s hand. That is a narrow promise, kept cheaply and at scale, which is more than most healthcare technology pilots manage.

Read more at https://lumiio.io/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

For organisations that have moved beyond pilot projects and deployed RFID at scale, a recurring problem tends to surface: knowledge becomes fragmented. One team knows the intricacies of UHF antenna placement, another understands the middleware integration, and a third manages vendor contracts. Nobody has the full picture. Building an internal RFID Centre of Excellence (CoE) is the structural answer to that problem, and it pays dividends well beyond tidying an org chart.

What a Centre of Excellence Actually Does

A CoE is not a committee that meets quarterly to review PowerPoints. It is a living function that owns the organisation’s RFID capability end to end. That means setting technical standards, governing vendor relationships, running training programmes, and maintaining a pipeline of innovation projects. Done properly, it prevents costly reinvention every time a new deployment lands on someone’s desk, and it stops the business from being over-reliant on a single supplier’s interpretation of what good looks like.

Organisational Structure

The most effective RFID CoE structures are lean. A core team of three to six people, depending on the scale of deployment, can serve an enterprise provided they have clear authority and visible executive sponsorship. Typical roles include a CoE lead with both technical and commercial competency, one or two RFID systems engineers covering the RF physics, hardware, and integration layers, a data and software specialist who understands how tag reads translate into business events, and a training and knowledge coordinator. The CoE should sit close enough to operations to remain grounded in real-world constraints, but with enough independence to challenge status quo decisions.

Knowledge Management

Institutional knowledge walks out of the door when people leave. A CoE needs a structured approach to capturing what it learns. This means maintaining a living technical library covering everything from read rate benchmarking results across different tag form factors to lessons learned from difficult deployments in metal-dense or liquid-heavy environments. Version-controlled documentation, accessible to relevant teams, is far more valuable than informal tribal knowledge. The CoE should also track standards evolution, particularly within GS1, ISO 18000, and the specifications governed by AIM Global, so that the organisation is never caught off guard by a compliance requirement.

Training Programmes

Training in RFID is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. A warehouse operative needs to understand how to handle tags correctly and recognise a reader fault. A procurement manager needs to understand the difference between a passive UHF inlay and an active BLE-RFID hybrid well enough to ask the right questions. An IT architect needs to understand the implications of EPC data models on downstream systems. The CoE should own a tiered training framework that serves each of these audiences without drowning any of them in irrelevant detail. Practical, scenario-based learning consistently outperforms vendor-led product training for building genuine competency.

Vendor Governance

RFID procurement without governance is expensive. Vendors naturally advocate for their own ecosystems, and without a CoE acting as an informed counterpart, organisations end up with incompatible hardware, proprietary middleware lock-in, and tag specifications that do not survive a change in supplier. The CoE should own a vendor register, conduct periodic performance reviews, and maintain the organisation’s position on interoperability requirements. That includes holding vendors to agreed read rate performance benchmarks and ensuring that any firmware or software updates are tested against live environments before deployment.

Innovation Pipeline

A CoE that only manages what exists will eventually become a bottleneck rather than an enabler. A structured innovation pipeline, even a modest one, keeps the function relevant. This might include evaluating RAIN RFID sensors for condition monitoring, assessing NFC-based consumer engagement use cases, or testing next-generation chip designs with improved performance in challenging environments. Innovations should be assessed against clear criteria: operational feasibility, ROI potential, and alignment with the organisation’s strategic direction. Small-scale proofs of concept, run within defined time and budget limits, are the right mechanism for this rather than large speculative projects.

Long-Term Capability Building

The real value of an RFID CoE compounds over time. As the function matures, it becomes the organisation’s trusted internal voice on RFID, reducing dependence on external consultants and shortening the procurement cycle for new deployments. It creates career pathways for technically minded people who might otherwise leave. And it gives leadership a single point of accountability for an increasingly business-critical technology. Starting small, with clear scope and genuine executive backing, is far preferable to an ambitious launch that loses momentum within eighteen months. Build the foundation properly and the capability will follow.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

You pull up the dossier. Material composition? Check. Substance test reports? Check. Supply chain evidence? Check.

Then they point to the NFC or RFID tag glued on the side. “And this?” they ask. “Show me the Declaration of Conformity for this specific component as part of the packaging unit. Show me how this antenna substrate behaves in the paper recycling stream. Prove it doesn’t contaminate the pulp.”

Silence.

Because for most of you, that tag is a black box. You bought it as a “tracking tool,” not as a “packaging component.” But under the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), now in force, that distinction is dead. The identification layer is the packaging. And if your identification layer is a fossil-fuel-based plastic sandwich that cannot be recycled with the box it sits on, your entire compliance file is compromised.

The identification paradox

The PPWR turns packaging into a data problem, yes. But there is a deeper layer most vendors are missing: the physical identity of the data carrier itself must not break the circularity of the package it identifies.

We are facing an identification paradox. We are sticking permanent, non-recyclable, multi-layer devices onto ephemeral, recyclable, bio-based packaging. We are solving a data problem by creating a material compliance nightmare.

Consider the standard RFID/NFC tag architecture still dominant today. It is a complex stack containing PVC adhesives, PET films, and chemically etched antennas.

Now, try to write a technical file for a paper box that includes this. Try to certify that this box is “recyclable” when the tag itself introduces non-paper contaminants that require industrial solvents to remove or that clog the repulping process. The APR (Association of Plastic Recyclers) and European recycling standards are clear: labels that introduce non-fiber contaminants are liabilities.

A blanket “all our packaging complies” statement is explicitly not acceptable under PPWR. Yet, how many RFID vendors can provide a signed Declaration of Conformity that covers the material integration of their tag into a specific packaging waste stream? Most cannot. They sell connectivity, not compliance.

The “paper-based” illusion

As the regulation bites, expect a surge of “sustainable” claims from vendors switching to paper face stocks. Do not be misled by the label “Plastic-Free” or “Paper-Based” if the core technology remains unchanged.

Many suppliers now offer tags with an FSC-certified paper face stock, marketing them as the green alternative. Yet, beneath that paper layer lies a chemically or laser-etched aluminium antenna. They argue that because the face stock is paper, the tag is recyclable. They claim the thin metal antenna is negligible, often comparing it to a staple allowed in paper recycling.

This is a dangerous half-truth that will not survive regulatory scrutiny. Recyclers do not sort by weight; they sort by physical behaviour in the pulper. A staple is a small, discrete object that can be screened out or sinks and floats predictably. An etched aluminium antenna, even if microns thin, is a continuous sheet of metal. It does not disintegrate in water. It wraps around mixer blades. It clogs filters. It creates micro-tears in the new paper sheet.

Under strict interpretation of recycling protocols such as PTS Paper, a continuous metal layer disqualifies the substrate from the standard paper recycling stream. If your “eco-friendly” tag contains a solid piece of metal that survives the pulping process, your technical file is vulnerable to rejection. You are attaching a non-recyclable metal component to a recyclable box. That is not compliance; that is contamination.

True compliance requires the antenna itself to disappear or behave like fibre. This means moving away from etched metal entirely.

The three-layer reality: printed conductive ink

This is not just an eco-friendly “nice to have.” This is a legal shield.

If your packaging is paper or cardboard, your identification layer (the part that stays on the box) must behave like paper. It must be recyclable in the paper stream without process disruption. Ideally, it should be compostable if the package itself is organic.

This is why the architecture of the active layers matters more than the chip inside. Strip away the layers that exist for manufacturing convenience rather than function, and three remain once the tag is applied:

• Substrate: FSC-certified paper.
• Antenna: printed conductive ink, with no etched metal and no continuous foil.
• Adhesive: compatible with paper recycling and composting processes.

The release liner is removed during application and managed as separate process waste, so it is not part of the final packaging unit subject to PPWR conformity.

No PVC. No PET. No chemical etching. No continuous metal sheets.

Built this way, a tag can hold DIN CERTCO and TUV Rheinland certification as compostable, and PTS Paper certification as recyclable with standard cardboard. Those are the certifications a technical file actually needs, and they are the ones worth asking a supplier to produce. Printed ink disperses or is filtered without disrupting the process, unlike a solid metal antenna. The identification layer then respects the lifecycle of the package it identifies, with no contamination risk and no exception to note in the compliance report.

The cost of being unprepared

Tags built this way carry a premium over mass-produced plastic labels. But frame the cost correctly: what is the price of a rejected Declaration of Conformity? What is the cost of a recall because your “sustainable” packaging was flagged for containing non-compliant metal contaminants? What is the reputational damage of a consumer peeling off your “smart” label, realising it’s a sheet of metal foil, and calling out your greenwashing on social media?

The math is simple. Paying a premium for the tag is an insurance policy against regulatory friction and brand erosion. It is the cost of doing business in a circular economy.

The clock is ticking

The PPWR is not coming. It is here. There is no grace period. Market surveillance authorities can request your technical files within 10 days.

If you are an RFID vendor, a brand owner, or a packaging integrator shipping into Europe, you need to audit your supply chain today. Don’t just ask your tag supplier if their chip works. Ask them for the material Declaration of Conformity. Ask them specifically: “Does your antenna contain continuous metal foil? How does it behave in a high-consistency pulper? Do you have PTS Paper certification for the complete tag, antenna included?”

If they hesitate, or if they hide behind the staple argument, you are already non-compliant.

The industry spent 30 years perfecting the read range and the data capacity of tags. The next decade will be about perfecting their exit strategy. Because the best tag for a circular economy isn’t just the one that connects the product. It’s the one that knows how to disappear.

Declared interest. Philippe Henin is the founder of Ma Balise, which distributes compostable and paper-recyclable RFID labels of the kind this article argues for. RFID News commissioned no payment for this piece and it was not paid for. We publish opinion from people with a commercial stake when the argument stands on its own evidence, and we tell you when they have one.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

That is changing. And it is changing quickly enough that SMEs who dismissed RFID two or three years ago should take another look.

Where the Cost Has Actually Dropped

The most visible shift is in UHF RFID tag pricing. Passive UHF inlays that once cost 20-30 cents each now sit closer to 5-8 cents at modest volumes. For an SME tracking a few thousand assets or products, that is a meaningful difference. Fixed UHF readers have also come down, with entry-level four-port readers now available under $500 from several manufacturers. Bluetooth-enabled handheld readers compatible with smartphones have opened up another affordable access point entirely.

On the HF and NFC side, the picture is similar. NFC tag costs have dropped in step with smartphone adoption driving production volumes. An SME running a small tool library, a sample room, or a customer loyalty programme can deploy NFC-based tracking with a modest initial outlay.

SaaS Models Remove the Infrastructure Burden

The bigger shift is not just hardware pricing. It is the move to cloud-based RFID platforms and SaaS subscription models. Historically, RFID software meant on-premise middleware, server licensing, and IT overhead. Today, platforms built on RAIN RFID infrastructure connect directly to cloud dashboards. Monthly subscription fees replace large upfront software costs. Updates, backups, and scaling are handled by the vendor.

For an SME without a dedicated IT team, this matters enormously. You are buying a managed capability, not building one.

Pre-Configured Kits Lower the Entry Point Further

Several vendors now sell bundled starter kits aimed squarely at smaller operations. A typical kit includes a fixed reader, two to four antennas, a batch of pre-encoded tags, and a cloud account with onboarding support. Inventory tracking for a small warehouse, asset management for a tradesperson fleet, or garment tracking for a boutique retailer: these are realistic starting points at under $2,000 all-in.

The key advantage of a kit approach is speed. You are not scoping a custom installation. You are configuring a tested system to your specific use case. Proof of value comes in weeks, not quarters.

Starting Small and Scaling

The architecture of modern RFID systems suits incremental deployment. An SME can start with a single read point, one location, or one product category and expand the system as ROI justifies it. Cloud platforms handle additional reader connections without requiring infrastructure changes. Tag volumes increase as the programme grows.

This is fundamentally different from the all-or-nothing deployments that defined enterprise RFID adoption in the 2000s. Scalability is now a genuine feature, not a marketing claim.

What SMEs Should Watch For

Affordability does not eliminate the need for proper planning. Read range requirements, tag placement constraints, RF interference from metal shelving or liquids, and backend integration with existing ERP or stock management systems still require careful consideration. Buying a cheap kit and expecting it to work without any site assessment is a common mistake.

The good news is that many vendors targeting the SME market now offer remote site surveys, guided onboarding, and integration support as part of their subscription. The barrier to getting started has genuinely lowered. The barrier to getting it right is about the same as it always was, which means the fundamentals still matter.

RFID for smaller businesses is no longer a question of if the economics work. For many use cases, they already do.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The Jamboree ran from 22 to 31 July 2026 at the Summit Bechtel Reserve, a Scouting America property of more than 10,000 acres at Glen Jean in West Virginia. Scouting America said the opening drew 15,000 Scouts, Venturers, Explorers, adult leaders, staff volunteers and community supporters. For readers coming to this later: Scouting America is the organisation that was called the Boy Scouts of America until 8 February 2025, when the new name took effect on the anniversary of its 1910 founding.

Two emblems doing two different jobs

The first, Avery Dennison says, was the Gnorm’s Great Scavenger Hunt NFC Emblem. Gnorm is the Jamboree’s gnome mascot, a character Scouting America’s own shop blog traces back to somebody spotting a gnome shape in the compass point of the event’s “Elevate” logo. Avery Dennison says the emblem powered the first digital scavenger hunt at a National Jamboree, with Scouts making NFC check-ins at points across the site to unlock program areas and chase the mascot, and that the patch sold out on the first day youth were on site. That sell-out is the vendor’s claim. Neither Scouting America nor Avery Dennison has published a production run, a number of taps or a completion rate.

The second was the Elevate Commemorative NFC Emblem, which Avery Dennison describes as a premium keepsake finished in gold mylar, where a single tap opened a digital video memory book of the week. Same silicon, different purpose: one emblem is an input device for a game, the other is a permanent link from an object to a piece of hosted media.

Why NFC is the right radio for a check-in, and RAIN RFID is not

What follows explains the technology in general terms. Avery Dennison has not published the chip, inlay or antenna specification for these particular emblems, so treat the detail as how this class of product normally works rather than as a datasheet for the Jamboree patches.

NFC here means a passive high frequency tag operating at 13.56 MHz, typically to ISO/IEC 14443, read by the NFC controller built into a phone. There is no battery. The reader’s magnetic field powers the chip through inductive coupling with a loop antenna, which is why the useful working distance is a few centimetres and no more.

That short range is not a compromise, it is the entire mechanism. A read only happens when a Scout deliberately holds a patch against a phone, so a successful tap is evidence that a specific person and a specific object were at a specific spot at a specific moment. Compare RAIN RFID, the passive UHF family working at 860 to 960 MHz, which reads tags at several metres and hundreds at a time. Mount a UHF reader at an activity area and it will happily read every tagged patch in every rucksack walking past on the trail. Excellent for inventory, useless as proof of attendance. For a scavenger hunt, the physics of NFC enforces the game rule for you.

The other reason a tap works with no app is NDEF, the NFC Data Exchange Format, the standard record layout the NFC Forum defined so any compliant phone knows what a tag is telling it. Write a URI record into the tag’s user memory and a modern Android or iOS handset reads it and offers to open that address in the browser. Nothing to download, no account, no pairing. For a one-week event with thousands of teenagers, that low barrier matters more than any clever feature would.

The hard engineering is the patch, not the chip

Putting a working inlay into an embroidered or woven emblem is genuinely awkward, and again this is the general engineering problem rather than a description of what Avery Dennison did here.

An HF tag antenna is a tuned loop, usually etched or printed aluminium or copper on a thin PET carrier, resonant at 13.56 MHz. Anything conductive placed close to that loop changes its effective inductance and capacitance and pulls the resonant point away from 13.56 MHz. Metallic embroidery thread and a metallised finish such as gold mylar are exactly that kind of neighbour. Detuning rarely kills a tag outright, it quietly halves the read range until a tap that should work at two centimetres needs firm contact and a second attempt. The fix is to tune the inlay for the finished construction, with the real thread, backing and laminate in place, rather than dropping in an off-the-shelf part and hoping.

Durability is the other half. A patch gets sewn or heat-sealed, folded into a rucksack, rained on and, if it reaches a uniform, washed. A thin etched antenna tolerates flex far better than a crease worked repeatedly in the same place, and a needle strike through a track is an open circuit, which is why patch inlays tend to sit in a defined window away from stitch lines. Reading through fabric is comparatively easy: textile is effectively transparent at 13.56 MHz in a way it is not for UHF near a human body, so the tag can be fully enclosed and still read cleanly.

Provenance is the quiet opportunity

Scout patch collecting is a real secondary market with a real counterfeit problem. Scouting Magazine has published guidance on spotting fakes since at least 2011, and rare Jamboree issues have long been reproduced well enough to fool a casual buyer. A tag that carries a unique, factory-programmed identifier changes that conversation, because the object can then be checked against an issuer’s record rather than judged on stitch density under a lamp.

To be clear, neither Avery Dennison nor Scouting America has presented these emblems as an anti-counterfeiting measure, and a plain NDEF URL that is identical on every patch would prove nothing about a specific one. The capability exists in the silicon whether or not it was used here, and it is the obvious next step for any organisation whose merchandise trades at a premium years after the event.

Where Avery Dennison fits

Avery Dennison is a materials science company headquartered in Mentor, Ohio, with reported 2025 revenue of about 8.86 billion US dollars. Its Intelligent Labels arm is one of the largest suppliers of RFID inlays and tags in the world, and its Embelex line covers apparel embellishment, including NFC-enabled badges. The company has run comparable projects in sport: it supplied the NFC tag in Willem II’s 130th-anniversary jersey, covered here in August 2026, and worked with Levi Strauss on an NFC patch for San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders.

The heritage line in the LinkedIn post is worth unpicking, because it is doing some work. Avery Dennison frames the Jamboree emblems as continuing a relationship with Scouting America “rooted in more than 100 years” of badge craftsmanship. That century belongs to Lion Brothers, the Owings Mills, Maryland embellishment maker founded in 1899, which Avery Dennison agreed to acquire on 26 April 2023 and folded into its Apparel Solutions business in the second quarter of that year. Lion Brothers reported roughly 65 million US dollars of revenue in 2022 and around 450 employees at the time. The badge relationship is inherited, not built.

What is still not on the record

Three things are missing from the public account, and each matters more than the marketing. Nobody has said which chip or inlay was used, or whether the tags carry unique serialisation. Nobody has published volumes, taps or how many Scouts actually completed the hunt, which is the only figure that would show whether the format worked. And nobody has said how long the video memory book behind the Elevate emblem will stay online.

That last point is the real design question for a connected keepsake. Patches from the 1937 Jamboree still change hands. A URL is nothing like that durable, and an emblem sold as a memory of a lifetime is only as good as the hosting behind it. A dead link in 2040 would make the patch look worse than a plain embroidered one. Anyone building tap-to-content merchandise should publish a commitment to how long the destination stays up, and at the moment nobody does.

More on tap-enabled apparel and event deployments in our NFC, Garment Tags and Customer Engagement sections, and the terms used above are explained in the RFID glossary.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

IOTE has now run for 25 editions and is one of the larger IoT and RFID trade events in Asia. The 2026 show ran from 26 to 28 August 2026 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition and Convention Center in Bao’an District, with the Innovative Product Awards judged across several hardware categories.

What the winning chips do

NFC, or near field communication, is a short range branch of HF RFID operating at 13.56 MHz, and it is what makes tap-to-read smartphone interactions work. Both award winning products run at that frequency and both present as NFC Forum Type 5 tags, the tag type built on ISO/IEC 15693, rather than the ISO/IEC 14443 route used by contactless payment cards. Our RFID glossary covers those terms in plain English.

NFC Connect PR1301, launched in March 2025, is a read-only chip carrying a pre-encoded unique identifier plus 96 bytes of user memory, with a data transfer rate of 26.48 kbps. It is specified for single or double sided aluminium antennas of 22 mm diameter or larger and suits paper or plastic inlays. Pragmatic positions it for consumer engagement, product authentication, traceability and digital product passports.

NFC Protect PR1311, added to the range in June 2026, is the tamper evidence part. Rather than bolting on a separate sensor, the chip inserts a dynamic byte into its NFC payload whose value changes when the seal is broken, so a single smartphone tap returns both the item identity and whether the pack has been opened, with no battery in the tag. Pragmatic aims it at categories where refilling and counterfeiting are expensive problems, including spirits, pharmaceuticals, beauty, baby food and pet food.

Why flexible chips matter here

FlexIC is Pragmatic’s name for its flexible integrated circuit platform. Instead of etching transistors into a rigid silicon wafer, the process builds metal-oxide thin-film transistors onto a flexible polyimide substrate at comparatively low process temperatures. The result is a chip thin and pliable enough to sit inside a paper label or wrap round a curved bottle without a detectable lump, made by a route the company says uses less water and energy and fewer harmful chemicals than conventional silicon. That combination is what the award cited: intelligence embedded almost anywhere, at high volume, with a lower carbon cost.

Pragmatic was founded in 2010 and manufactures at Pragmatic Park in County Durham, home to the UK’s first 300 mm wafer fab, formally opened in 2024. It raised $231 million in a Series D round in 2023, at the time the largest semiconductor venture funding round raised in Europe. The commercial proof point came in March 2026, when Avery Dennison, one of the world’s largest suppliers of RFID and NFC inlays, announced the first mass scale integration of the PR1301 into a commercial inlay portfolio.

A Chinese brand identity and a China push

Alongside the award, Pragmatic used IOTE Shenzhen 2026 to introduce a Chinese brand identity, Pragmatic 湃, and to run customer and partner demonstrations of connected packaging, product authentication and item-level intelligence.

“Connected products are a critical tool for brand trust, product authentication and protection, and consumer engagement,” said James Davey, SVP Sales, Business Development and Product Management at Pragmatic Semiconductor. “We are pleased to showcase our customer and partner innovations which demonstrate how flexible semiconductor technology can help brands expand market opportunities and connect the physical and digital worlds.”

“With our award-winning NFC product portfolio, expanding partner ecosystem, and new dual brand, we are deepening our commitment to customers in China while continuing to scale our global business,” Davey added.

More on chips, inlays and tags of this kind sits in our smart packaging and HF hubs.

Read more at https://www.pragmaticsemi.com/pragmatic-awarded-rfid-product-gold-prize-at-iote-2026-innovation-awards/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

What NFC ticketing actually does at the turnstile

The mechanism is the same short range HF RFID link that sits behind contactless payment. A wallet pass lives on the handset, the reader in the turnstile raises a 13.56 MHz field, and the phone answers in card emulation mode. On iPhone the credential is presented through Apple’s Value Added Services profile, on Android through Google Wallet and Smart Tap. What crosses the air interface is a cryptographic exchange rather than a picture of a barcode, and once the pass has downloaded the tap itself does not need a data connection, which matters in a bowl holding better than forty thousand people.

Juventus has not published the detail an integrator would want. There is no named reader vendor in the announcement, no stated ticketing platform partner and no published standard. The club refers to new high performance turnstile scanners arriving alongside the digital rollout, wording that leaves open whether an optical path survives for edge cases. Until Juventus says otherwise, the honest reading is a wallet first NFC deployment with new head end hardware, rather than a documented NFC only estate.

The Premier League got here first, and the pattern is familiar

Anyone following our coverage of English football will recognise the shape of this. The Premier League made digital ticketing a condition of membership from the 2026/27 season, with a two year grace period for promoted clubs. The league’s own wording is deliberately technology neutral. A digital ticket is one delivered electronically and assigned to a named supporter, protected by hidden or rotating barcodes. Nothing in that language requires a radio.

Clubs went to NFC anyway. At least fifteen Premier League clubs now have tap entry deployed to some degree, Tottenham Hotspur are removing QR codes from their passes entirely for 2026/27, and West Ham United have been running wallet entry at London Stadium for several seasons. The clubs did not pick 13.56 MHz because the mandate told them to. They picked it because the operational problem they needed to solve was throughput at the gate.

The difference in Turin is who is doing the pushing. In England a league deadline set the timetable and each club chose its own technology. In Italy there is no equivalent league requirement covering stadium access, so Juventus is moving on its own commercial judgement. That arguably makes it a stronger signal rather than a weaker one. No club retrofits an entire ingress estate and retires PDFs on a whim, and once the largest club in a league proves the model works over a full season, the pressure on everyone else becomes competitive rather than regulatory.

Italy has already had its dress rehearsal

Juventus is not arriving at NFC cold. On 13 May 2026 the Coppa Italia final between Lazio and Inter at the Stadio Olimpico ran as Italy’s first NFC only event, with tickets available exclusively as Apple Wallet or Google Wallet passes and paper and PDF explicitly refused at the gate. That was one fixture, on neutral ground, with a single controlled audience and every supporter warned well in advance.

What Juventus is proposing is materially harder. Every fixture, every gate, every category of ticket holder, across a full season, including the occasional visitor who turns up once a year and has never installed the app. Italian nominal ticketing rules already require each ticket to carry a named holder whose identity can be checked at entry, which changes the value proposition compared with England. English clubs adopted NFC largely to fix throughput and touting. Italian clubs are already legally obliged to bind tickets to identified individuals, so a wallet pass sitting in a secure element on a named supporter’s phone is a cleaner enforcement mechanism for a requirement that already exists, not a new layer of control.

Juventus frames the switch around combating the secondary ticket market and ticket touting through what it calls increasingly effective and tightly controlled technological solutions. That is the same argument that pushed English clubs off static barcodes. A printed barcode is an image, so it can be photographed, forwarded and sold as often as the seller likes, and whoever arrives second is the one who loses. A wallet credential presented over NFC cannot be screenshotted in any useful sense, because the reader is not looking at the screen at all.

The numbers behind the decision

The rest of the club’s update explains why ingress is the thing worth spending money on. Serie A attendance at the Allianz Stadium averaged 40,711 in 2025/26, which is 97.7 per cent capacity utilisation, or 98.9 per cent once the away section is excluded. No shows fell to 7.8 per cent, meaning 92.2 per cent of seats were physically occupied, against a figure north of 15 per cent seven years earlier. Takings passed the 2018/19 benchmark.

Juventus does not attribute the no show improvement to any particular ticketing change, and it would be wrong to assume one. What the figures do establish is that the stadium is running close enough to full that entry flow is the constraint. At 97.7 per cent utilisation the difference between a two second tap and a fumbled barcode scan compounds across forty thousand people arriving inside a narrow window before kick off. A digital estate also gives the club clean per gate ingress data in real time, so it can see which passes were presented, at which lane and at what minute, and act on unused seats, transfers and resale on evidence rather than inference.

Connectivity is part of the access story

5G coverage is being rolled out across the whole site by the end of September, which Juventus links to stable and high performance connectivity throughout the matchday experience. That matters more to a wallet deployment than it first appears. The tap itself works offline, but everything around it does not. Pass delivery, last minute reissues, transfers and resale all depend on supporters getting a usable signal on a crowded concourse, and a club at 100 per cent digital access has removed the paper fallback that used to absorb those failures.

Elsewhere in the same update, seventy VIP seats are being added with a redesigned VIP Stand layout, the hospitality partnership with the Da Vittorio group has been renewed, and the Juventus Museum remains among Italy’s fifty most visited facilities, with the Alessandro Del Piero tribute exhibition drawing more than 14,000 visitors over the Christmas period alone.

What to watch

Two things will show whether this is a genuine NFC only estate or a wallet first one with an optical safety net. The first is how Juventus handles supporters whose handsets cannot present a wallet pass, the group English clubs covered with explicit accessibility and over 65 provisions written into the Premier League mandate itself. The second is whether the club publishes anything about its reader estate and validation platform, because nothing on the hardware side has been disclosed so far.

Either way, the direction of travel across Europe is now hard to miss. A league mandate in England, a cup final in Rome and a full season commitment in Turin have all landed inside eighteen months, and all of them arrive at the same 13.56 MHz interface in the supporter’s pocket.

Read more at https://www.juventus.com/en/news/articles/from-last-season-s-numbers-to-a-new-fan-experience-the-allianz-stadium-continues-to-reinvent-itself

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

This is not just a door key. USC describes the CarolinaCard as the permanent USC ID card plus a flexible spending declining balance card, carrying CarolinaCash and Meal Plan dollars, with balances and account history managed through an online portal. Meal plans are supplied by Carolina Food Co. and are mandatory for first year students living on campus. The mobile version therefore has to do identity, physical access and payment at the same time, which is what makes a campus card a harder problem than a plain access badge.

What the first phase covers

The initial phase takes in residence halls, classrooms, dining locations, parking facilities, recreation facilities, postal services and the library, with expansion planned later to off campus locations and to other campuses in the system. That opening list is the high traffic estate rather than the whole university, so coverage on day one is partial by design. Anywhere outside it carries on as before until the rollout reaches it.

Activation is self service. Users download Transact eAccounts, select University of South Carolina, sign in with their network credentials, upload an ID photo and a government issued photo ID, then choose Add to Wallet. The credential can be held on up to two devices. Access is by tap at card readers, with barcode scanning in the app for certain services. The CarolinaCard Office is handling support on 803-777-1708 and carolinacard@sc.edu.

“USC wanted to make everyday campus life easier,” said Chavis McDonald, Director of Customer Experience and Change Management for Business Affairs. “Students, faculty and staff already manage so much from their phones, so bringing the CarolinaCard to a mobile format felt like a natural next step.” McDonald also framed the move as forward looking: “Mobile credentials open the door for future innovation. They create a more flexible and secure foundation that can grow with the university.”

What actually changes under the reader

The following is general practice in campus credentialing rather than a description of USC’s specific configuration, which has not been published. A campus card estate of this type runs on 13.56 MHz HF contactless, and a mobile credential in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet reaches the reader over NFC, with the phone emulating a card. The credential itself sits in the phone’s secure element, not in the app. The app is the enrolment and account management front end, not the thing the reader talks to.

The architectural change that matters is not the form factor, it is provisioning. A mobile credential is issued and revoked over the air. A lost plastic card means a trip to the card office, a replacement fee and a window in which the old card is still physically capable of opening a door. A lost phone credential is killed centrally and reissued to a new device in minutes. That is the reason universities keep citing security when they explain these projects, and it is a fair reason.

Apple’s implementation also supports Express Mode, so the card presents at a door or a till without unlocking the phone, and on recent iPhones it keeps working for a period after the battery is too flat to run the phone. That detail is what makes a handset credible as a room key at all. A credential that fails when the battery dies is not a credential.

The two device limit is not an arbitrary policy either. Each provisioned credential is a separate cryptographic instance sitting in a separate secure element, and campus systems are typically licensed or billed per credential. Two is the usual compromise between a phone and a watch.

Tap or barcode tells you how far the hardware refresh got

The most informative line in the announcement is the mix of tap to access and barcode scanning. Where the reader estate has been upgraded you get an NFC tap. Where it has not, the app falls back to a barcode on the screen, read by whatever scanner is already at the counter. Every large campus mobile credential rollout is really a reader replacement programme with an app on top, and the barcode fallback is the honest signal of how far that refresh has actually reached. Expect the barcode footprint to shrink as more readers are swapped out.

Retiring the plastic is the interesting decision

USC is explicit that once the mobile credential is activated, the physical CarolinaCard is deactivated and can no longer be used. Plenty of universities run both in parallel. Going mobile only per user is cleaner, because two live credentials for one identity is a genuine administrative and audit headache, but it does put the handset on the critical path for getting into your own room.

That raises a practical question the announcement does not settle. Mobile credentials are not mandatory for students, according to earlier reporting in The Daily Gamecock and Carolina News and Reporter, which also noted that incoming spring 2026 students acted as a pilot group. Anyone who does not have a supported phone, or does not want to carry one, presumably stays on plastic. It would be useful to see USC spell out how that group is served, and what happens when a phone is lost, stolen or in for repair.

Worth stating plainly: USC has not published the reader hardware, the credential format or the secure element implementation behind the Mobile CarolinaCard, so nothing above should be read as a claim about the specific technology in use on campus.

Read more at https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/carolinacard/index.php

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Writing for FFX Now, Angela Woolsey reported that when a card is scanned near the bus doors, the RFID technology embedded in it allows the driver, via recently upgraded tablets, to see who the student is, their assigned bus stop, and where and when they board and leave the vehicle. FCPS told the outlet in a press release that “these simple taps will help the FCPS Office of Transportation know which students are on which school buses, improving safety and efficiency for one of the largest public school bus operations in the country”.

This is not a cold start. Per FFX Now, FCPS began testing the bus technology in summer 2025 and widened it to more drivers through the 2025-2026 school year. The tablets do more than register taps: they display the driver’s assigned route, assist with navigation when a road closure forces a detour, and relay data in real time to a dispatcher who can send help in an emergency, as Superintendent Michelle Reid explained in a video quoted by the outlet. FCPS Bus Driver Supervisor Lei Shi told FFX Now the pilot drew “positive feedback from the drivers, especially for the navigation functions”, adding: “I’m confident that when everyone knows how to use the system, gets used to it, it will be a very powerful tool.”

The parent-facing half arrives later this autumn. FFX Now reports that a new mobile app will replace Here Comes the Bus, giving families real-time updates on bus location and on boarding and alighting events. The outlet noted, pointedly, that FCPS was careful to frame the system as tracking the location of the student’s bus once they tap in, not the students themselves. Dr Reid made the same distinction in her own remarks, saying the ID cards for transportation “are not tracking cards”.

Every student gets a card, including those who never ride a bus, because FCPS intends to extend them to school meals and field trips. The cards are colour-coded by school and carry details of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on the reverse, a requirement under Virginia law since 2023.

The supplier nobody named

Here is the gap worth flagging. Five local and regional outlets covered the launch, FFX Now among them, and not one identified a vendor. There is no supplier press release, and no company has publicised the win.

The trail runs through FCPS’s own material rather than any news coverage. In her Superintendent’s Weekly Reflections, Dr Reid described “a Mobile Data Tablet training session … this new technology (called ‘Tyler Drive’)” and noted that “more than 1,100 drivers participated in training”. The page is undated, but internal references place it around 1 February 2026. Tyler Drive is a product of Tyler Technologies of Plano, Texas. The replacement parent app, named “FCPS My Ride” on the district’s family page, matches Tyler’s My Ride K-12.

The contract is on the record too. FCPS School Board briefing papers dated 14 April 2023 list a non-professional services award to Tyler Technologies, contract 4400011204, for student transportation routing software at $838,750 a year, $3,355,000 in total, running to 31 December 2027 with four one-year renewal options. It came out of FCPS solicitation RFP 2000003294, which closed on 25 August 2021.

What remains unidentified is who made the cards. Tyler’s own Tyler Drive product page says the system “integrates with NFC or other student ID cards” and offers unassigned-stop alerts, which reads as integration rather than supply. Nothing published names the firm that printed and encoded roughly $260,000 of credentials for a division moving about 130,000 students a day across some 45,000 stops, and no systems integrator has been named either. FCPS’s own March 2026 board presentation attributes the work to FCPS Transportation Services and FCPS IT.

Which frequency, though

FFX Now says RFID. Tyler says NFC. FCPS has not confirmed an air interface, so 13.56 MHz HF/NFC is the likely reading rather than a settled fact.

As general technical context, the distinction matters operationally. An HF/NFC credential presented at a reader beside the door is a deliberate act: read range is a few centimetres, the child has to hold the card to the target, and cross-reads from a card sitting in a rucksack two seats back are effectively impossible. That precision is exactly what you want when the record has to say which child boarded, not which children were nearby. The trade-off is throughput and tap discipline, because every boarding needs an intentional presentation and a card left in a bag stops the queue. Passive UHF would read further and faster but brings stray-read risk in a metal tube full of children. The harder data-quality problem in any tap-based scheme is the tap-out: boarding taps tend to hold up well because the reader sits in the choke point at the door, while alighting taps are where records go missing and where a bus-location feed to parents quietly does the work the card was meant to do.

Read more at https://www.ffxnow.com/2026/07/23/fcps-to-roll-out-new-student-id-cards-for-school-bus-tech-upgrades/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Walmart framed the change as a matter of choice rather than a reversal. “We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best” for them, the company said in its announcement. The existing options all stay in place: cash, credit cards, Walmart Pay with its Walmart+ fuel savings, and Sam’s Club Scan & Go. Customers can also load eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards into their digital wallets.

What is actually being switched on

Tap to pay runs on near field communication, a short range radio technology operating in the high frequency band at 13.56 MHz. The contactless bank cards already in most wallets are governed by ISO/IEC 14443, the proximity card standard that defines the air interface, the modulation and the anticollision procedure. Phones bring in ISO/IEC 18092, which covers NFC’s peer to peer and card emulation behaviour and allows a handset to present itself to a reader as though it were a card. Both sit on the same 13.56 MHz carrier, which is why a single read head at the till can serve a piece of plastic, an iPhone and a smartwatch without needing to care which is which.

The defining characteristic of the technology is its range. An NFC link works over a few centimetres, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than a limitation anyone is trying to engineer away. Coupling is inductive and near field, so the signal falls off steeply with distance, and the practical result is that a customer has to hold the device against the terminal to transact at all. A UHF RAIN RFID tag can be read across a room. A payment credential should not be, and the physics of the 13.56 MHz near field does a good deal of the security work before any cryptography gets involved.

The payment itself is EMV contactless, specified by EMVCo and implemented in the terminal as a set of contactless kernels, one per scheme, which handle the transaction flow once the radio link is established. NFC is the transport. EMV is the conversation carried over it. That distinction matters for understanding what Walmart has actually done here, because a terminal already running an EMV contactless kernel for tapped debit and credit cards is running most of the same stack a phone needs.

Tokenisation and the card number the retailer never sees

When a card is added to Apple Pay or Google Wallet, the wallet does not store the card number. The scheme’s tokenisation service issues a device specific token, known in the industry as a DPAN or device primary account number, bound to that particular handset and that particular card. The real funding PAN stays with the issuer and the token service provider. Every tap then generates a one time cryptogram, computed in the device’s secure element and unique to that transaction, so intercepting the exchange yields nothing that can be reused.

That is the mechanism behind the privacy point made in coverage of the announcement, that the actual card number is concealed during the transaction. It is not marketing language. The merchant’s systems receive a token and a cryptogram, and a captured token cannot be replayed on another device or typed into a website. For a retailer processing transaction volumes on Walmart’s scale, accepting tokens rather than raw PANs also reduces the amount of sensitive data moving through the estate.

The QR code Walmart preferred instead

Walmart Pay, built to keep payments inside Walmart’s own app, works optically. The customer opens the app, selects payment, and the terminal displays a QR code that the phone’s camera scans. It works, and it gave Walmart a direct channel to its customers along with the data that comes with it. But as a checkout interaction it asks considerably more of the shopper than a tap does. The app has to be open and on the right screen, the camera needs a clear line of sight to the terminal display, that display has to be bright enough and clean enough to resolve, and the camera needs a moment to focus and decode. Under harsh store lighting, with a scratched terminal screen or a phone dimmed by battery saver, every one of those steps gets slower.

A tap has none of those dependencies. The device needs proximity, not line of sight, and the transaction completes in a fraction of a second whether the phone is held flat, at an angle or inside a case. A few seconds of difference is trivial once and significant across millions of lane transactions a day.

MCX, CurrentC and the decade of resistance

Walmart’s position was never accidental. It was a driving member of the Merchant Customer Exchange, a consortium of large US retailers formed to build CurrentC, a mobile payment system designed explicitly as an alternative to Apple Pay and structured to keep merchants in control of the customer relationship and away from card scheme economics. MCX’s membership terms included exclusivity, and during 2014 and 2015 several members switched off the NFC acceptance already present in their terminals in order to honour them, most visibly at Rite Aid and CVS, which disabled contactless within weeks of Apple Pay’s launch. CurrentC never progressed beyond limited testing and was discontinued in 2016.

Walmart carried on regardless, promoting Walmart Pay and Scan & Go while contactless acceptance spread around it. Apple Pay is now accepted at around 85% of US retailers, and Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kroger and H-E-B took tap to pay long ago. Walmart was the conspicuous holdout. There was an awkward inconsistency inside its own estate, too, because Walmart Canada has accepted Apple Pay since 2020, which makes clear the objection in the US was strategic rather than technical.

That is also the strongest clue about the scale of the work involved. Walmart’s terminals have overwhelmingly carried contactless capable read heads for years, because the US market moved to EMV contactless card acceptance over that period, and the well founded industry read of this announcement is that it is largely a matter of enabling the NFC path and wallet acceptance in software and configuration rather than a hardware replacement programme. Walmart has not described the technical work involved, and the staged schedule, running more than a year before it reaches fuel sites, points to certification, testing and estate management rather than one switch being thrown.

Why Walmart’s scale moves the numbers

The market context explains the timing. Digital wallets accounted for 11.8% of consumers’ most recent in store payments in 2025, closing on cash at 12.1%, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. Mobile wallet in store usage reached 31% of consumers by late 2025, more than double the 14% recorded in 2024. Apple Pay was used for 10.2% of eligible in store transactions in 2025, up from 8.9% the year before, on estimated annual in store sales volume of $450 billion. These are survey and industry estimates rather than audited figures and should be read as directional.

Walmart’s absence has been quietly suppressing all of those percentages, because the denominator included an enormous number of transactions at which tapping was simply not an option. Adding the largest US retailer to the accepting side does two things at once. It lifts the share of eligible transactions mechanically, and it removes one of the last practical reasons for an American shopper to keep a physical card in reach out of habit. Google Pay, PayPal and Cash App stand to gain alongside Apple Pay. OnePay, whose cards Walmart is encouraging customers to load into wallets, has extended Apple Pay support to its CashRewards Card, with its Builder Card due to follow later in 2026.

For the contactless industry the notable part of this is not the technology, which has been settled and deployed for well over a decade, but the concession. Walmart bet that its own scale could push the US market towards a merchant controlled, QR based standard. The market went the other way, and the company has now accepted that holding the line was costing its own customers more than it was winning.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

LF: Short Range, Tough Environments

Low frequency tags work at 125 to 134 kHz. The read range is short, rarely exceeding 10 cm, and data transfer is slow. But those limitations come with a trade-off that many applications find valuable: LF signals penetrate water, living tissue, and metal-heavy environments far better than any other band. Animal implants (ISO 11784/11785) rely on this property. So does industrial equipment tracking where tags are embedded inside metal housings. If your items are wet, oily, or packed together in bulk liquid, LF handles it when other frequencies stumble.

HF: The Sweet Spot for Smart Cards and NFC

High frequency at 13.56 MHz is the most versatile band for close-range identification. Read range stretches to about a metre with ISO 15693 readers, while ISO 14443 (the basis for most contactless payment and access cards) operates at under 10 cm by design for security reasons. NFC is a subset of HF. The standards are mature, the reader infrastructure is widespread, and performance near liquids is acceptable with thoughtful tag placement. Smart ticketing, library management, pharmaceutical authentication, and hotel key cards all live here.

UHF: Speed and Scale for Supply Chain

UHF operates between 860 and 960 MHz, with the exact band varying by region. Read range is the headline feature: passive tags typically read at 3 to 8 metres, and some dense reader deployments can interrogate hundreds of tags per second. This makes UHF the backbone of retail inventory, pallet tracking, and RAIN RFID-based logistics. The weakness is sensitivity to context. Tags attached to metal or placed on liquid-filled containers detune noticeably. Specialist on-metal or on-liquid tags exist but add cost. For dry goods, apparel, and cardboard packaging, UHF is hard to beat on price-to-performance.

Microwave: High Speed, Specialist Use

Microwave RFID at 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz offers high data rates and is primarily found in active tag systems. Electronic toll collection and vehicle identification systems in some regions use this band. The technology handles high-speed identification well, but tags are larger, more expensive, and require a power source. Blockage by walls, metal structures, and even the human body is a real constraint. Microwave RFID is not a general-purpose choice. It solves specific problems where data throughput and active operation justify the cost.

Picking the Right Frequency

Start with your environment. Metal and liquids present? LF or a specialist HF or UHF on-metal tag. Need to read a single card or device at close range? HF. Tracking hundreds of items across a warehouse portal? UHF. High-speed vehicle access or active positioning? Microwave or active UHF. Cost pressure usually favours UHF for passive deployments at scale. Regulatory constraints matter too: UHF frequencies differ between Europe (865-868 MHz) and North America (902-928 MHz), so global deployments need readers that cover both.

No single frequency wins across all scenarios. Match the physics to your application and you will avoid expensive retrofits later.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The book carries photographs Nakazato took in the Canary Islands, the trip that shaped the collection. Holding a smartphone over the embedded tag opens a dedicated website with show footage and related material, so recipients could keep exploring the collection during the week and after it closed. Murata gives the tag as 13.56 MHz with a communication distance of a few centimetres, standard for near field communication.

The collection, titled Sea of Fire INFERNO and shown on 8 July, took its cue from the black volcanic cliffs and dark water of Tenerife. Garments shifted from blue to red on the runway, borrowing from monogi, the onstage costume change used in Noh and Kyogen theatre. Epson and YKK worked on it alongside Murata. July also marked ten years since Nakazato joined the official Paris couture calendar, still the only Japanese house on it.

Why an NFC tag rather than a printed QR code

Murata’s stated design argument is straightforward. The tag does its job without appearing on the page, so no visible 2D barcode has to compete with the photography. A printed code needs to be sized for reliable scanning and placed somewhere it will not wreck the layout. An NFC inlay sits inside the paper and leaves the artwork alone. On a shipping label that is a detail; on a photobook meant to work as an object, it is the point.

The other half of the case is the reader. Current iPhones and mainstream Android handsets read NFC natively, and iOS has supported background tag reading since iOS 13, so in most cases there is no app to install and nothing to launch. That is what makes a tag workable as a fashion week giveaway, where nobody will download software to look at a book handed to them on the way out.

Paper is a harder substrate than it looks

Getting an HF inlay into a bound book is a tougher piece of engineering than a garment hangtag. The reasons below are general RFID practice, not anything Murata has said about this particular build.

• An HF antenna is tuned against everything near it, so coated stock, adhesive and moisture in the paper all shift the resonant frequency.
• Metallic ink, foil blocking and gilded page edges are common in high end print and will detune or simply shield an antenna, so tag placement has to be agreed with the print finisher, not bolted on afterwards.
• Binding, pressing and trimming stress the inlay, and a cracked antenna loop or broken IC bond cannot be repaired once the book is glued.

Murata has not published a part number, IC vendor, memory size or antenna geometry, and has not said which NFC Forum tag type the inlay uses. Broadly, a tag used this way carries an NDEF record holding a URL, which is what lets a phone open the site with nothing in between.

Where this sits in fashion’s wider NFC push

Murata’s own framing is that RFID “is increasingly being used as a means of connecting physical objects and information” across manufacturing, logistics, retail and fashion, with traceability, product authentication and distribution channel management among the applications. The company says the collaboration shows how electronic component expertise can “create new value” and “enhance experiential value across a wide range of fields.”

That is more than sponsorship copy, because the same 13.56 MHz tag class is being asked to do several jobs in fashion at once. Brands already use NFC for authentication and resale verification, and the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is pushing textiles towards item level Digital Product Passports, which need a persistent machine readable carrier on the product. A tag that opens a show film today is the same class of device that will hold a garment’s compliance record tomorrow, which is a fair argument for reading a couture giveaway as a pilot rather than a stunt.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

This is an expansion of NXP’s existing Petaling Jaya operation rather than a greenfield build. The company describes the new plant as a highly automated smart factory, using Automated Material Handling Systems (AMHS) to move work between process steps alongside what it calls advanced quality management technologies. No investment figure has been published.

Why back-end capacity matters

Assembly and test, usually shortened to A&T, is the back end of semiconductor manufacturing. Wafers arrive from a fab, are thinned and singulated into individual die, then packaged, bonded and electrically tested before anything ships. Front-end wafer fabs get the headlines and most of the government money, but packaging and test capacity is what actually gates how many finished parts leave the building in a given quarter. A fab with spare wafer starts is worth very little if the back end behind it is already full.

For an RFID audience the relevance is indirect but real, and it is worth being precise about what the announcement does and does not say. NXP has not broken out any product line for the Petaling Jaya expansion. The release refers only to “NXP’s broad product portfolio”, and NXP’s own description of the Malaysian site covers assembly and test of microprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, and mixed signal and radio frequency products. There is no statement that UCODE RAIN RFID tag ICs or NTAG NFC tag ICs are built or tested there.

What is on the record is that NXP is the largest supplier of RAIN RFID (UHF) tag ICs and of NFC tag silicon, and that the company cited the UCODE ramp as a growth driver in its first quarter 2026 results, having launched UCODE X in January 2026. Tag IC volumes are enormous and the margins per die are thin, so back-end throughput and packaging cost matter more in this corner of the market than in almost any other. Any read-across from this expansion to RFID product lines is inference rather than fact, but inlay makers and converters who spent the last few years managing allocation and long lead times on tag ICs have a legitimate interest in NXP adding assembly and test capacity anywhere in its network.

Andy Micallef, executive vice president and chief operations and manufacturing officer at NXP Semiconductors, said: “Malaysia has been an important part of NXP’s global manufacturing footprint for decades, with a strong semiconductor ecosystem and skilled talent base. This expansion builds on that foundation, increasing our assembly and test capacity while diversifying operations to strengthen supply chain resilience and flexibility for customers worldwide.”

The phrase worth noting there is “diversifying operations”. Buyers across the industry have pushed suppliers to demonstrate that no single site or subcontractor can take a product line offline, and internal capacity in more than one location is one of the few answers that survives a procurement questionnaire. Malaysia already handles a substantial share of the world’s chip packaging and test work, so this is a deepening of an established cluster rather than a bet on a new one.

What to watch

• The first quarter 2028 production ramp, with site output projected to more than double at full capacity.
• Whether NXP names any product lines for the new building as it approaches qualification.
• The engineering pipeline. NXP says it works with Malaysian universities on engineering education and research partnerships, although the release names none.

Read more at https://www.nxp.com/company/about-nxp/newsroom/NW-NXP-BREAKS-GROUND-SITE-MALAYSIA

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

So the architecture is now legally real. What it is not yet is usable. As of mid-August, no brand, manufacturer or solution provider has publicly confirmed a completed registration in the EU DPP Registry, and for the first mandated product group they could not have done so even if they wanted to. The registry’s semantic catalogue for batteries has not been defined, so battery passport submissions fail validation outright. The Commission’s own user guide for economic operators says so in plain language. What is open today is organisation enrolment, identity verification and rehearsal in the test environment.

That gap between a live system and a usable one is where the interesting decisions are being made, and most of them are carrier decisions. The regulation itself will not make those for you. It goes out of its way not to.

What Implementing Regulation 2026/1778 actually does

The first thing to understand about the registry is that it is not a passport database. It is a registration ledger and a directory. Article 3 sets out what it consists of: a web interface, an API, a verification platform, a mechanism for generating unique registration identifiers, storage of unique product identifiers and commodity codes, a public list of verified DPP service providers, a semantic repository, logging, and identification and authorisation schemes. The passport data itself stays with the economic operator or its appointed DPP service provider. The registry holds the pointer, the identifier and the back-up link.

The scope in Article 1 is wider than most coverage has acknowledged. This is not an ESPR-only registry. It serves products covered by ESPR delegated acts, batteries under Article 77 of the Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, construction products under the new Construction Products Regulation, toys under the Toy Safety Regulation, detergents and surfactants under Regulation (EU) 2026/405, and any other Union law that requires DPP registration in future. Article 2 states flatly that for registry purposes, a battery passport is a Digital Product Passport. One registry, many regimes. That matters for anyone building infrastructure, because it means the integration you build for batteries is the same integration you will use for textiles and tyres.

Article 8 is the article that touches hardware. Registration happens at model, batch or item level, depending on what the applicable product act requires, and an item-level registration must also carry the batch and model identifiers alongside it. On submission the registry runs automatic checks: semantic conformity against the product group’s catalogue, granularity, commodity code validity, and the presence of a working link to the back-up passport. Pass those and you get a unique and persistent registration identifier.

Article 9 gives you a downloadable proof of registration, sealed with a Commission qualified electronic seal and timestamp, containing the product identifier, commodity code, operator identity, date and time, and a hash of the passport version. It is valid for 90 days per generation. Read one caveat carefully before anyone in your organisation starts calling this a compliance certificate: ESPR Article 13(5) says registry confirmation is not to be deemed proof of compliance. The checks are structural. They confirm the passport is well formed and reachable, not that its contents are true.

The seal, not the chip, is the first real bottleneck

Before you can register anything you must become a verified economic operator, and this is where companies are getting stuck right now. Articles 4 and 5 require EU-established legal persons to submit evidence of identity and establishment using a qualified electronic seal supported by a qualified certificate issued by a qualified trust service provider under eIDAS. Sole traders use a qualified electronic signature or a high-assurance eID. In practice that means procuring a QSeal certificate from a qualified trust service provider and applying it in PAdES format to a Commission-generated declaration PDF, which is a procurement and IT task that most product and packaging teams have never had to run before.

Verified status lasts a maximum of three years. Let it lapse and you cannot register or modify passports until you are re-verified. Article 5 extends the same process to value chain actors: repairers, refurbishers, remanufacturers and recyclers. In other words, the people you most want reading and writing to the passport in the field are subject to the same identity regime as the brand owner. Member States have until 18 February 2027 to appoint their designated national administrators under Article 7, which is the same day the first passports become mandatory. Default data retention is ten years.

If you sell RFID or AutoID into brands, this is worth knowing simply because it reorders the conversation. The carrier question is not the first thing a compliance lead will be dealing with. It is the second. But the two are linked, because the verification cycle and the three-year re-verification are precisely the sort of overhead that pushes organisations towards a single carrier strategy across product lines rather than a per-SKU decision.

Why the registry says nothing about QR, RFID or NFC

Search the full text of Implementing Regulation 2026/1778 for “QR”, “RFID”, “NFC” or even “data carrier” and you will find nothing. That is deliberate, not an oversight. The registry rules are carrier-neutral because the carrier decision sits elsewhere, in the product-group delegated acts.

The ESPR’s own definition is broad enough to keep every AutoID technology in play. Article 2(29) defines a data carrier as “a linear barcode symbol, a two-dimensional symbol or other automatic identification data capture medium that can be read by a device”. That final clause is the one the RFID industry has been leaning on for two years, and it holds. The only carrier examples anywhere in the regulation appear in recital 37, which mentions a watermark and a QR code, and recitals are not operative text.

The operative choice, meaning which carrier or carriers must be used, plus layout and positioning, is made per product group under Article 9(2)(b) and (c). Article 10(1) requires the carrier to be physically present on the product, its packaging or accompanying documentation, and to comply with the ISO/IEC 15459 series or with harmonised standards. Article 12(6) obliges the Commission to keep identifier and carrier rules technologically neutral to the largest extent possible.

So the framework is genuinely open. Whether any given product ends up with a printed QR code, an NFC tag, a RAIN RFID inlay or some combination will be settled product group by product group, in acts that mostly do not exist yet. That is the single most important thing for RFID vendors to internalise: the carrier fight is not over, it has barely started, and it will be fought in the textile act, the tyre act and the furniture act rather than in the framework.

EN 18220 puts RFID on the harmonised list

Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 of 14 July, published on 15 July, harmonised six standards drafted by CEN/CENELEC JTC 24: EN 18216 on data exchange protocols, EN 18219 on unique identifiers, EN 18220 on data carriers, EN 18221 on data storage, archiving and persistence, EN 18222 on APIs and EN 18223 on system interoperability. Two more from the family of eight, EN 18239 on access rights and security and EN 18246 on data authentication, are expected to be harmonised around September 2026. Note that 2026/1736 is an implementing Decision, not a Regulation, whatever some secondary coverage says. Compliance with a harmonised standard gives presumption of conformity with ESPR Articles 10 and 11, which is the practical value here.

EN 18220:2026 is the one that matters to this readership. It covers optical 2D symbologies, meaning QR Code and Data Matrix, and RFID in both HF/NFC and UHF/RAIN forms, with requirements on symbology, encoding, production quality, print quality, durability, placement and marking. The governing principle running through it is persistence: the carrier has to stay readable for the life of the product, which for a tyre or a construction product is a long time and a hostile environment. There is also a widely reported requirement that at least one carrier must be readable by an ordinary smartphone without a dedicated app, which is the clause that keeps a 2D symbol on almost everything regardless of what else is fitted.

One honest caveat. EN 18220 is a paywalled 44-page document and the exact enumerated carrier list is not something the trade press has verified against the standard text. The RAIN Alliance describes RAIN as one of five approved data carriers recognised by JTC 24. Other summaries count four families. If you are writing a carrier specification that will be audited, buy the standard rather than trusting anyone’s blog, this one included.

EN 18219, the companion identifier standard, reportedly admits several identifier schemes including GS1 Digital Link URIs, IEC 61406 identification links, W3C decentralised identifiers, RFID and 2D product identifiers, and DOIs, with operator identifiers including the GLEIF LEI. The important structural point is that GS1 Digital Link is one route among several rather than the only one, even though it is comfortably the most commercially entrenched.

The carrier decision determines what the passport can actually do

Regulatory neutrality has an unhelpful side effect. It lets people treat the carrier as a late-stage packaging detail, when in fact it decides the entire operational value of the passport. A DPP is only worth what it costs to read, multiplied by how often you can afford to read it. That calculation changes completely depending on the carrier.

QR and Data Matrix

Cheapest per unit by an enormous margin, effectively free if you are already printing a label. Universally readable by consumers with no additional hardware. Line of sight required, one item at a time, and the read has to be a deliberate human act. Vulnerable to abrasion, soiling, overprinting and being covered by a later label. For consumer-facing disclosure, which is what most of the DPP’s stated purpose is about, it is entirely adequate. For anything involving reading a hundred items in a tote or verifying a returned garment at a goods-in desk, it is a bottleneck.

NFC

Short range by design, typically a few centimetres, which is a feature rather than a limitation when the interaction is intentional. Readable by every modern smartphone with no app install, which is the property that makes it the natural upgrade path from QR for premium consumer goods. It supports authentication and tamper evidence in ways a printed symbol cannot: NXP’s NTAG X DNA line is explicitly positioned for DPP on that basis. NFC also survives being covered, which matters for garment care labels and anything that will be laundered or re-packed. The NFC Forum published its NFC Digital Product Passport candidate specification in March 2025 and folded DPP support into NFC Release 15 in June 2025, which the Forum says extends read range roughly fourfold. Per-unit cost is real but has fallen sharply, and dual-frequency inlays have made the marginal cost of adding NFC to an existing RAIN tag smaller than it was.

RAIN RFID

The only one of the three that scales to bulk reading. Metres of range, no line of sight, hundreds of items per second, and the ability to read a sealed carton or a full rail of garments without touching anything. That is the property that turns a passport from a disclosure document into an operational data source. It is also the one carrier a consumer cannot read today, which is the standing objection to RAIN as a primary DPP carrier and the reason EN 18220’s smartphone-readability principle effectively guarantees a 2D symbol alongside it.

That objection is eroding, though not quickly. Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690, announced in September 2025, is described as the first enterprise mobile processor with fully integrated UHF RAIN RFID, with Zebra, Honeywell and Urovo among the adopters. That is enterprise handheld territory rather than consumer phones, so it fixes the read problem for staff in a store, a warehouse or a repair shop without doing anything for the shopper. Useful, but it does not remove the case for a 2D fallback.

Dual frequency, which is where the market is actually going

The interesting product releases of the last year have not picked a side. Tageos launched the EOS-920 NFC inlay and the EOS-620 Seal dual-frequency RAIN plus NFC inlay on EM em|echo-V silicon in December 2025, explicitly for DPP. Xindeco IoT unveiled a RAIN UHF-powered DPP solution in January 2026 with a dual UHF plus NFC and QR architecture. The logic is straightforward: RAIN handles the supply chain, NFC handles the consumer and the field technician, and a printed 2D symbol handles the regulator and the person with a flat phone battery. Three carriers, one identifier, one passport. It costs more per unit, and for high-value or long-lived goods it is defensible.

Item level versus batch level, and the serialisation question underneath it

Article 8’s granularity rule is the quiet hinge in the whole implementing regulation. Model, batch or item, as the product act requires. Everything about carrier economics follows from where a given product group lands.

At model level, a passport is a document about a product design, and a printed symbol is plainly sufficient. At batch level, you get provenance and recall precision but no individual unit history. At item level, every physical unit carries its own identity and its own record, and the passport can genuinely accumulate a history: repairs, ownership transfers, refurbishment, eventual material recovery.

Item level is also the point at which serialisation stops being free. A GTIN identifies a product line. A GTIN plus a serial number, encoded as an SGTIN in EPC terms, identifies a thing. That means serial number allocation and management at production line speed, and it means a carrier that can hold a unique value per unit. A printed serialised QR code can do that, at the cost of variable data printing and the associated print verification. A RAIN tag does it natively, because unique serialisation is the entire premise of the technology.

This is the strongest argument the RFID industry has, and it is worth making precisely rather than loudly. The joint RAIN Alliance and GS1 position paper of September 2025 makes it: GS1 identifiers plus RAIN give automatic and scalable access at item-level precision. Decathlon is quoted in that paper calling RAIN with GS1 encoding a de-facto reference solution for any Digital Product Passport system, and Michelin describes its tyre work built on GS1 identifiers and ISO RFID standards. That is not marketing from tag vendors, it is brand owners who already tag at item level for inventory reasons and can see that the passport rides along at close to zero marginal cost.

Where GS1 has actually landed, which is less favourable

It would be a mistake to read the joint paper as GS1 endorsing RFID as the primary DPP carrier. It has not. The GS1 in Europe position puts GTIN plus serial or lot as the product identifier and a GS1 Digital Link QR code as the primary carrier, aligned with the global Sunrise 2027 migration to 2D, with Data Matrix for space-constrained items. The provisional GS1 DPP application standard, GSCN-26-266 v2 of June 2026, is explicit: where EPC/RFID is used it shall be in addition to a QR Code or Data Matrix, and the barcode’s serial number must match the serial encoded in the SGTIN on the tag. NFC was added only in June 2026, and as an optional additional carrier.

In GS1’s scheme, then, RFID is supplementary. Not excluded, not discouraged, but never on its own. Anyone selling a RAIN-only DPP proposition into a GS1-aligned brand is going to lose that argument, and the sensible commercial position is the one the dual-frequency product launches have already taken: sell RAIN as the operational layer on top of a 2D baseline, not as a replacement for it.

The battery paradox

The first mandatory passport in Europe will not use RFID at all. Battery Regulation Article 13(6) requires that from 18 February 2027 all batteries are marked with a QR code as described in Part C of Annex VI, printed or engraved visibly, legibly and indelibly, or applied to packaging and documents where that is not possible. Article 77(3) makes that QR code the access route to the battery passport. From the same date, each LMT battery, each industrial battery above 2 kWh and each EV battery placed on the market must have a battery passport.

There is one door left open. Article 13(8) allows the Commission to adopt delegated acts providing for alternative types of smart labels for use instead of or in addition to the QR code, in view of technical and scientific progress. No such act exists and none is scheduled. If the RFID industry wants batteries, that article is the lever, and it will take evidence from deployed pilots rather than position papers.

Meanwhile the battery regime is running late in both directions. Registration is blocked by the missing semantic catalogue. And Article 77(9) required the Commission to adopt implementing acts specifying who counts as a person with legitimate interest in accessing restricted battery passport data by 18 August 2026. No such act appears to have been adopted, and the Commission’s own DPP timeline now shows it in Q4 2026. That is not a trivial slip. Legitimate-interest access is the mechanism by which a recycler or a second-life operator gets at the data that makes the passport worth having, and until it is defined, the three-tier access model in the Battery Regulation has a hole in the middle of it.

Four places the passport gets read, and why only one of them tolerates QR

The carrier argument becomes concrete the moment you follow a passport through its working life.

• In the warehouse, the read is bulk, unattended and high volume. Goods-in verification, cycle counting, dispatch confirmation. Line of sight is the enemy. RAIN is the only carrier that works here, and if the passport identifier is not on a RAIN tag, the warehouse simply will not use the passport, it will keep using whatever inventory system it already has.
• In the store, the read splits. Staff need bulk stock accuracy, which is RAIN, and is why apparel retailers already tag at item level. Shoppers need a self-service read, which today means QR or NFC. This is the clearest case for dual frequency, and it is not a DPP argument at all, it is an existing retail argument that the DPP happens to reinforce.
• In the repair shop, the read is deliberate, single item and needs authentication. Is this the genuine part, what is its service history, who is allowed to write to the record. NFC with cryptographic authentication is a better fit than either alternative, and the eIDAS verification requirement in Article 5 for repairers and refurbishers means the write side has an identity model attached to it.
• In the recycling facility, the read is the hardest problem in the whole chain. Items arrive damaged, soiled, compressed, mixed and often shredded. A printed symbol is frequently unreadable by the time it gets there, which is exactly when the material composition data in the passport is most valuable. Passive RFID at least degrades more gracefully. The RAIN Alliance and NFC Forum’s joint position on the WEEE Directive revision in March 2026 argued for passive RFID to remain outside the revised directive’s scope, and cited CIRPASS-2 testing passive RFID across textiles, electronics and batteries. Whether the tag survives the shredder is a separate and unsolved question.

What the pilots chose when they had a free hand

CIRPASS-2, the roughly 19 million euro Digital Europe programme project running to April 2027, has 49 partners and 13 lighthouse pilots across textiles, electronics, tyres and construction. Michelin’s tyre pilot is explicitly RFID, built on the ISO standard for electronic tyre identification plus the GDSO tyre industry dataspace, which is the single most convincing item-level RFID DPP deployment anyone can currently point at. Six textile pilots involve the usual traceability names, and the RAIN Alliance and NFC Forum claim up to 99 per cent identification accuracy with passive RFID in textile pilots, which is the Alliance’s own figure rather than an independently published CIRPASS-2 result.

Against that, Sweden’s Trace4Value textile pilot, run with TrusTrace, Kappahl, Marimekko and GS1 Sweden across more than 3,000 garments, used a plain GS1 Digital Link QR code and no RFID at all, and worked. That is the honest state of play. Where the operational case already exists independently of the regulation, as in tyres and in apparel inventory, RFID wins. Where the objective is disclosure to a consumer or a regulator, QR is sufficient and cheaper, and pilots keep choosing it.

There is also a design argument against putting much on the tag at all. The NFC Forum’s NDPP pitch is offline, on-tag passport data. The EU’s own CIRPASS project recommended the opposite in deliverable D3.3 back in February 2024: store an identifier URI in the carrier and nothing more, on the grounds that offline data storage adds cost and complexity without proportionate benefit. The harmonised standards, with their separate treatment of carriers, identifiers, storage and APIs, lean the same way. Sell the tag as the pointer, not the database.

Does any of this move tag volumes?

Be careful here, because the temptation to overclaim is considerable and the numbers do not support it. RAIN tag chip shipments fell in 2025 to 42.7 billion, down from a record 52.8 billion in 2024, which the RAIN Alliance attributed to inventory cycles, tariff uncertainty and retail destocking. The same announcement leaned on DPP qualification as a forward driver. VDC pushed its 115 billion unit milestone from 2028 out to 2029. IDTechEx forecasts the total RFID market at 23 billion US dollars by 2036 and names DPP as a growth support rather than a driver. ABI Research has projected 62.5 billion apparel DPPs created in 2030, but that counts passports, not tags, and gives no carrier split.

No analyst has published a figure isolating DPP-attributable RAIN or NFC tag volumes, and anyone quoting one is extrapolating. The realistic read is that the DPP does not create demand for tags on its own. What it does is remove objections. It gives a procurement case that was previously justified on shrink and inventory accuracy a second, regulatory-adjacent justification, and it makes item-level serialisation a compliance conversation rather than an operations one. That is worth something. It is not a step change in unit volumes.

Where this goes next

The Commission’s indicative timeline is now reasonably specific. Around September 2026, an implementing decision on the remaining two DPP standards, EN 18239 on access rights and security and EN 18246 on data authentication. Q4 2026, the ESPR delegated act for iron and steel, and the overdue battery access-rights implementing act. 18 February 2027, battery passports mandatory, QR marking mandatory on all batteries, and Member State national administrators appointed. Q2 to Q3 2027, delegated acts for construction products and for DPP service providers. Q3 to Q4 2027, the ESPR delegated acts for textiles, aluminium and tyres. Furniture in 2028. Mattresses and recycled content in 2029. Economic operators get at least 18 months of transition after each act, so textile obligations realistically bite around 2029. The ESPR Article 14 public web portal and the customs interconnection land at the far end, around 2029 to 2030, with the customs link legally due within four years of 2026/1778 entering into force.

Two of those dates deserve a ring on the calendar of anyone selling AutoID. The tyre delegated act, because tyres are the one ESPR priority product group with an established item-level RFID practice, an ISO electronic identification standard and a working industry dataspace, which makes it the most likely place for RFID to be named rather than merely permitted. And the textile act, because apparel is where item-level RAIN tagging already exists at enormous scale for entirely commercial reasons, and where the marginal cost of carrying a passport identifier on tags that are being applied anyway is close to zero.

Nothing in the framework will force that outcome. Carrier neutrality cuts both ways: it kept RAIN and NFC in scope when the obvious drafting instinct was to write QR into the text, and it also means neither will ever be mandated. The decision gets made product group by product group, in delegated acts drafted over the next eighteen months, and it gets made on evidence from deployments that either exist by then or do not. The registry going live changed the deadline. It did not change the argument, and the argument is being settled now in tooling quotes and label specifications, not in 2029.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Willem II’s own account is straightforward enough. The tag sits on the underside of the anniversary home shirt, a Meyba design that went to pre-order on 1 July and carries no commercial branding on the front or back. Tapping it opens Tricolores+, where supporters sign in with a Willem II account to reach squad and behind-the-scenes content. The club says access will widen over time to season ticket holders, club card holders and WII Kings members.

Every shirt, not a limited edition

The scale is the part worth noting. Avery Dennison describes the tag as going into all jerseys for the season rather than a commemorative run, which puts a chip in ordinary retail stock rather than in a few hundred collector pieces. That is a different proposition from the NFC work most clubs have done so far, where the tag was the reason for the special edition. Here it is standard fit, and the company frames the result as turning shirts into multi-season engagement channels rather than a one-off campaign.

The supplier layer nobody names

Willem II does not name a technology partner. Avery Dennison’s own newsroom has not carried a Willem II item either, so the announcement exists only as a social post. That is normal for garment embellishment, where the heat transfer, the crest and the labelling come from a supplier the shirt buyer never hears of. It is also the layer that matters to anyone tracking where NFC in apparel is actually going, because the tag, the encoding and the tap experience are all supplier decisions.

What is actually in the shirt

This is NFC, not UHF RAIN RFID, and the distinction is not academic. An NFC tag works at 13.56 MHz in the HF band, follows ISO/IEC 14443 and the NFC Forum tag types, and is read at a few centimetres by a phone that supplies the power. It carries no battery. The tap works because the tag holds an NDEF record with a URL, so the phone opens the Tricolores+ landing page without any app installed, on iOS or Android. Each tag also carries a unique identifier, which is what lets a club tie a tap back to an individual garment rather than to a generic campaign link. Garment inlays for this job have to survive washing, ironing and the flex of a jersey in play, which is why they are laminated into the embellishment rather than clipped in as a hard tag.

NFC jerseys are moving down the league table

Avery Dennison has been building this programme for a while. It ran what it calls the world’s first NFC-enabled season jersey with Trabzonspor, with the tag in the club crest and the tap unlocking signings, player messages and polls. It worked with Canterbury on the British and Irish Lions’ first connected rugby jersey, with the chip at the bottom of the shirt feeding a Lions Clubhouse platform. It made NFC badges for New York Jets shirts around the London game. It holds licensing deals with the Premier League and Major League Soccer, where it supplies names, numbers and sleeve logos across all 30 MLS clubs through its Embelex embellishment portfolio.

Every one of those is a flagship. Willem II is a club that came back up into the Eredivisie this season and is playing for survival in it. The story is not that another football shirt has a chip in it, it is that connected apparel has stopped being a marquee project for global brands and turned into a line item on a mid-sized club’s kit order. For the club, the return is first-party data: who tapped, what they looked at and when, tied to a shirt rather than to a cookie. For anyone selling NFC into apparel, it is the more useful signal of the two.

Read more at https://www.averydennison.com/na/en/industries/apparel/solutions/consumer-fan-engagement

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

That does not mean contactless cards are risk free. In 2025, criminals took £46.8 million through contactless fraud in the UK, according to UK Finance, the trade body that collects the industry’s numbers. But essentially all of that came from cards that were physically lost or stolen and then tapped in shops by the thief. Not one meaningful slice of it came from someone silently reading your card through your coat. A wallet that blocks radio waves does nothing whatsoever about a card that has been nicked from your back pocket. Understanding why is the interesting part, so let us take it apart.

What is actually in your bank card

Look closely at a contactless card and you will see a small gold or silver square: that is the chip. What you cannot see is the antenna, a loop of very fine wire or printed metal that runs around the inside edge of the plastic, sandwiched between the layers. Together they make up an RFID tag. RFID stands for radio frequency identification, and it means exactly what it sounds like: identifying something using radio waves rather than a barcode or a magnetic stripe.

The clever bit is that there is no battery in there. The chip has no power source of its own. When you hold the card near a shop terminal, the terminal is broadcasting a small electromagnetic field, and your card’s antenna soaks up a tiny amount of energy from that field, just enough to wake the chip and let it answer back. This is called a passive tag, and the same trick powers your dog’s microchip, your office door pass and the tag sewn into a new T-shirt.

Bank cards use a specific flavour of this called near field communication, or NFC, which runs at 13.56 megahertz. The clue is in the name. Near field means the card and reader have to be extremely close, because the card is not transmitting a signal in any normal sense. It is nudging the reader’s own magnetic field and letting the reader detect the wobble. That effect collapses very quickly with distance. Our explainer on how NFC relates to RFID goes into the physics properly, but the practical upshot is simple: a shop terminal reads your card at about four centimetres, and it needs the card roughly flat and square to the reader to manage even that.

What a thief would actually have to do

Picture the crowded train scenario the adverts love. To take money off your card wirelessly, a criminal standing behind you would need four things to line up at once.

First, they need a reader powerful enough to reach your card through a coat, a bag lining and a leather wallet. Researchers have built these. They are not pocket sized, they are conspicuous, and even the good ones struggle past ten or twenty centimetres in laboratory conditions with the card held perfectly still and perfectly aligned. On a moving train, with your card at a random angle among five other cards that all answer at once and jam each other, the read simply fails.

Second, they need somewhere to send the money. A card does not hand over cash. It authorises a payment to a merchant. To take your £30, the thief has to be a registered merchant with a payment terminal, a bank account and a trading history, all of which are tied to a real identity that gets frozen and arrested the moment the fraud reports come in. Stealing this way is the equivalent of robbing a bank while wearing your own name badge.

Third, they have to beat the limits. Contactless payments have long carried a per transaction cap, £100 for most of the last few years. In March 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority removed that fixed industry cap and let banks set their own, though most have kept familiar limits while they review their fraud controls. Either way, every card also carries a cumulative limit, a running total after which the terminal demands your PIN. So a thief gets, at most, a couple of small hits before the card locks itself behind a number they do not have.

Fourth, and this is the one that kills the business model, you are not liable. Under UK rules, an unauthorised payment gets refunded by your bank, which then eats the loss and goes hunting for the merchant who took the money. So the criminal has done something technically difficult, in public, using a traceable payment account, for less than a hundred pounds, that the victim gets back anyway. There are far easier crimes.

So why does the fear sell so well?

Because it is a wonderfully cinematic idea: an invisible thief, a hidden machine, money vanishing through your clothes. It also arrived at the right moment. When contactless launched in Britain in 2007 nobody trusted it, and a genuine early flaw existed: the first cards would answer a reader with the number and expiry date in the clear. Researchers demonstrated it, the press ran with it, and a product category was born.

The cards were fixed years ago. A modern contactless card generates a one time cryptogram for each tap, a scrambled code that is valid for that single transaction and useless afterwards. Even if someone did capture a read, they would be holding a receipt, not a key. But the fear outlived the flaw, as fears do, and the wallets kept selling. Our piece on the myths that cling to RFID covers a few more of these zombie stories.

There is also a quieter commercial reason. Blocking costs almost nothing to add, since any metal mesh will do it, so the feature gets bolted onto a wallet you were buying anyway and sold as protection. Very few sellers are lying to you. They are selling a real feature against an unreal threat.

When blocking genuinely is worth having

There are a handful of cases where shielding earns its keep, and they are mostly about confusion rather than crime.

If you keep several tappable cards loose in one wallet they can interfere with each other at the reader, which is why a barrier between them sometimes stops the “card not read” dance at the till. On the London Underground, carrying two contactless cards risks card clash, where the gate charges whichever card it reads first and you end up paying twice for one journey. Transport for London has always advised presenting one card on its own, and a shielded pocket is a tidy way to enforce that.

The real risk, which no wallet fixes

If you want to reduce your chance of contactless fraud, ignore the radio and look at the physical card. Of that £46.8 million lost to contactless fraud in 2025, the overwhelming share came from cards that were lost, stolen or intercepted in the post, and then tapped in shops before the owner noticed. Add the wider £109.8 million lost to lost and stolen card fraud generally, and the picture is clear. The thief is not standing behind you with a scanner. They are picking up the card you left on the pub table.

So the useful habits are dull ones. Turn on transaction alerts in your banking app, because the fastest fraud detector in the world is you seeing a notification for a shop you are not standing in. Check your statement monthly rather than annually. Report a missing card immediately rather than waiting to see if it turns up, because the moment you report it the card is dead and the liability question is settled. And if you use a phone or watch to pay, you are already ahead, because those require your face or fingerprint before they release anything at all.

Buy the metal wallet if you like the way it looks. Just do not buy it because you are frightened.

Frequently asked questions

Do RFID-blocking wallets actually block signals?

Yes. A layer of metal around a card forms a Faraday cage, which stops radio waves passing through. Test yours: put the card inside, close it and try to pay. If the terminal cannot see it, the shielding works.

Has anyone in the UK actually been robbed by wireless card skimming?

There is no confirmed pattern of it. UK Finance does not report a category for wireless skimming losses because the volume is not there, and police forces have not brought prosecutions for it. Contactless fraud in the official figures is dominated by physically stolen cards being tapped in shops.

Can someone read my card through my pocket?

In a laboratory, with a large purpose built reader, a card held still and nothing else nearby, a read at ten to twenty centimetres is possible. In a real coat pocket, at a real angle, next to other cards, it reliably fails. And a read on its own does not give a criminal anything spendable, because each tap produces a one time code.

Do I need to protect my passport as well?

The chip in a British passport will not release its contents until a reader has optically scanned the printed page inside, so it cannot be read from a distance by someone who has never had the document in their hands. A shielded cover does no harm, but the cryptography is doing the real work.

What about tin foil, does that work?

It does, which tells you something about the price of the branded version. Any continuous conductive layer will disrupt the field. Foil is just less durable and considerably less flattering at the till.

What should I actually do to stay safe?

Switch on instant payment notifications in your banking app, report a lost card the moment you notice, pay with your phone or watch where you can, and remember that unauthorised payments are refundable by your bank. Those four things cover more real risk than any wallet ever will.

RFID News explains the everyday technology nobody bothers to explain. If you would like the next one in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. You can also browse everything we have written on RFID and security.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The architecture is a familiar one in secure credentialling circles, and an unusually under-reported one in the RFID trade press. Each cardholder’s biometric reference is written to the card itself; at the point of use a camera captures a live facial image and the system performs a one-to-one comparison against the reference tied to that specific credential. That is verification, not identification: there is no search across a population-scale gallery, and according to the company no biometric record needs to travel to a back-end server for the decision to be made.

Match-on-card is the term of art here

The established name for this approach is match-on-card, also written as on-card biometric comparison, and it is standardised in ISO/IEC 24787. In a strict implementation the reference template never leaves the chip at all: the terminal extracts a template from the live capture, sends it to the card over the contactless interface, and the card’s own secure microcontroller runs the comparison and returns a match or no-match result. The credential becomes the biometric database, and it is a database of exactly one person.

MIA Teknoloji’s announcement is not explicit on where the comparison itself executes, describing only that a device compares the new capture against data associated with the card. That distinction matters more than it sounds. If the template is read off the card and compared in the reader, the privacy story rests on the reader discarding it; if the comparison runs inside the card’s secure element, the reference is never exposed to the terminal in the first place. Anyone evaluating the system commercially should establish which of the two it is.

This is HF contactless smart card territory, not UHF

Identity and access credentials of this type sit in the HF band at 13.56 MHz, almost always as ISO/IEC 14443 proximity cards read at a few centimetres, with ISO/IEC 7816 command handling on top and, in eID and ePassport work, the ICAO Doc 9303 security model (PACE, secure messaging, EAC) governing how the chip’s data groups are protected. It is not UHF RAIN RFID: the deliberately short read range is a security feature, the interface supports the APDU exchange that on-card cryptography and biometric comparison require, and the throughput of an ISO/IEC 14443 link at 106 kbit/s and above comfortably handles a facial template, which typically runs from a few hundred bytes to a few kilobytes rather than a full photograph.

Face is the harder modality to do this way. Fingerprint match-on-card has been shipping in volume for years, including Neurotechnology’s on-card matching algorithms and the fingerprint-authenticated NFC access credentials from Zwipe and LEGIC, because fingerprint templates and comparison routines fit the modest compute budget of a smart card chip. Doing the equivalent with facial templates on constrained silicon is a genuine engineering result, which is presumably where a sizeable chunk of that 98 million lira went.

The KVKK angle

MIA Teknoloji positions the design as aligned with Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK), and the logic is sound as far as it goes: keeping the reference on the card removes the centralised biometric honeypot and cuts the number of transfers of special-category data. It does not remove the obligations around it. Consent capture, access logging, retention limits and the handling of enrolment data all still have to be right operationally, and a lost or cloned card raises its own questions about how the on-chip reference is bound to the credential and to the issuer.

No customers, volumes or launch dates yet

What has been announced is the completion of an R&D programme, certified as such by the ministry, and nothing further. MIA Teknoloji has not named an initial customer, disclosed production quantities, or given a commercial launch date, and the company describes commercial deployment as the next stage rather than a current one. Until a pilot with a named issuer emerges, this is a validated design looking for a deployment, not a product in the field.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The certification followed an independent audit by the Kantara Initiative, one of the conformity assessment bodies that carry out DIATF audits. The Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA) oversees the framework itself rather than performing the audits. What Signicat has certified is a component rather than a finished consumer service: the Norwegian identity firm is offering its technology and orchestration to third party services that are themselves certified for those use cases.

What the chip is actually doing

ReadID reads the contactless chip embedded in e-passports, biometric residence permits and national ID cards. That chip is a proximity card under ISO/IEC 14443, operating at 13.56 MHz in the HF band, and it is the same air interface an NFC-capable smartphone uses when it acts as a reader. No dedicated hardware is needed at the point of check, which is what made phone-based chip reading practical for remote onboarding.

The data on the chip is structured per ICAO Doc 9303, which organises it into logical data groups. DG1 holds the machine readable zone data (name, document number, nationality, dates), DG2 holds the facial image, and further groups hold optional biometrics and issuer information. Hashes of those groups sit in the Document Security Object, signed by the issuing country’s document signer certificate, which chains back to that country’s certification authority. A verifier can therefore establish two things: that the data has not been altered since issue, and that it came from the state it claims to.

Getting at that data is deliberately awkward for anyone who does not have the document in hand. Access is gated by Basic Access Control or, on newer documents, the stronger PACE protocol, with session keys derived from the printed machine readable zone. Reading the chip therefore requires optical access to the document as well as radio access to it. Chip authenticity is a separate question, answered by Active Authentication or Chip Authentication, in which the chip proves it holds a private key that cannot be extracted. That is what distinguishes a genuine chip from a cloned copy of its contents written to a blank.

Why chip beats page

Conventional identity checks read the printed page, by eye or by OCR of a photograph, then judge whether the security printing looks right. Both are attackable at the point of capture. A printed page can be altered, a photograph of one can be edited, and an injected camera stream can present a document that never physically existed. Cryptographic verification of the chip is indifferent to how convincing a forgery looks, because any change to a data group breaks the signature covering it.

Signicat says the certified technology pairs the document check with facial verification, matching a live capture against the image held on the chip to confirm that the person presenting the document is its legitimate holder and is present at the time of the check.

The UK backdrop

Signicat positions the timing as significant. Its announcement points to government statements ending the Digital Identity scheme, which in the company’s reading leaves the trust framework, under OfDIA’s guidance, as the main route to wider digital ID adoption in the UK. Certification against the DIATF becomes correspondingly more important for suppliers serving regulated checks.

“Organisations and individuals spend an exorbitant amount of time and money trying to keep up with fragmented identity regulations across Europe and the UK,” said Ray Ryan, UK country manager at Signicat. “The DIATF certification alongside our other certifications ensures regulated sectors have a unified, independently certified secure method to onboard staff and customers instantly, without leaving the door open to sophisticated fraud.”

This is a compliance milestone rather than a new deployment. ReadID is an established commercial product, and Signicat says the technology and orchestration covered by the certification is already handling millions of transactions per month for public and private institutions. What changes is the component’s standing in the UK: providers assembling a certified Right to Work, Right to Rent or DBS service can now fold in an audited NFC document verification layer without proving it out themselves.

Read more at https://www.signicat.com/press-releases/signicat-secures-key-uk-digital-identity-trust-certification

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Under the definitive agreement announced on 24 June, Trackonomy Systems will acquire Identiv’s IoT business assets, its German R&D centre and its Thai subsidiary, along with $25 million in cash, in exchange for $50 million in Trackonomy preferred equity. The Identiv brand transfers as part of the deal. What stays listed on Nasdaq keeps the INVE ticker, takes a new name, and becomes an acquirer of compliance SaaS businesses in regulated industries. Identiv calls the signed asset purchase agreement “a significant milestone under the Transform pillar” of its Perform-Accelerate-Transform strategy and now expects it to close in the third quarter, subject to a stockholder vote.

For the RFID industry that is a meaningful exit. Identiv has been one of the recognisable Western names in ultra-high-volume HF and NFC inlay production, with silicon-agnostic converting capacity and a customer base spanning healthcare, logistics, consumer electronics, luxury goods and smart packaging. The company puts its cumulative footprint at more than 2.0 billion applications. Those product lines are not disappearing, but they will sit inside Trackonomy, a physical AI and battery-powered smart label specialist whose commercial centre of gravity is very different from a transponder converter’s.

Margins improve as the manufacturing footprint shrinks

The quarter itself was the best evidence yet that the operational clean-up worked. GAAP gross margin came in at 16.1 per cent against negative 9.4 per cent a year ago, and non-GAAP gross margin at 24.5 per cent against negative 0.8 per cent. Identiv attributes the swing to the elimination of Singapore manufacturing costs, better cost utilisation at the Thailand facility and a reduction in inventory obsolescence charges. GAAP operating expenses rose to $6.4 million from $5.9 million, but the non-GAAP figure fell to $4.0 million from $4.5 million, the difference largely accounted for by $1.5 million of strategic review costs tied to the sale process.

GAAP net loss narrowed to $4.7 million, or 20 cents a share, from $6.0 million, or 26 cents. Adjusted EBITDA loss halved to $2.7 million from $4.6 million. Across the first half, revenue was $13.1 million against $10.3 million, with a net loss of $8.1 million against $10.8 million.

Cash and equivalents stood at $119.4 million at 30 June, down from $128.6 million at the end of December, with total assets of $140.7 million and stockholders’ equity of $133.1 million. That cash pile is the legacy of the $145 million sale of Identiv’s physical security, access card and identity reader operations to Vitaprotech, agreed in April 2024. Selling the IoT side completes a two-step disposal of everything the company used to make.

ID-Tiny, BLE and a chip queue

Product work continued through the quarter. Identiv expanded its ID-Tiny family, a portfolio of ultra-miniaturised HF and NFC inlays and tags aimed at products too small for conventional inlay geometries, which is the segment where a converter with fine-pitch antenna capability can still command a price. The Thailand plant, the one heading to Trackonomy, is preparing to expand its BLE product portfolio.

Two supply and demand problems were flagged. Chip allocation delays on certain products are affecting production and shipment timelines, a familiar constraint for anyone buying HF and NFC silicon in volume. Separately, one major customer built significant inventory and is pausing new order activity over the coming months, with a resumption expected late this year. Identiv also notes that broader macroeconomic conditions continue to weigh on demand in consumer-facing applications.

Both feed into soft guidance. Third quarter net revenue is expected between $4.1 million and $4.8 million, a sequential step down from $5.7 million, and that range excludes any effect from the asset sale closing.

On capital, the board intends to return up to $40 million to stockholders through repurchases, dividends or distributions, and plans to resume common stock repurchases shortly, ahead of the transaction closing. There was no earnings call this quarter, which the company put down to the pending Trackonomy sale.

Buyers with HF or NFC inlay supply agreements in place should be reading the closing timetable rather than the margin line. The products, the German engineering team and the Thai manufacturing base all move to a new owner within months, and the entity keeping the Nasdaq listing will be in an entirely different business.

Read more at https://ir.identiv.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/460/identiv-reports-second-quarter-2026-financial-results

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

“The new X40 is a pocket powerhouse,” said Jinoh Kim, Bluebird’s chief executive. “It’s sleek and ultra-fast. It’s RFID-enabled, and its AMOLED display, a world-first in enterprise-grade computers, delivers vivid colour and superior visibility under any lighting conditions, as well as consuming less power.” Kim also pointed to a Red Dot Design award won this summer, where judges described the device as an “impressively efficient tool for retail and logistics”.

An integrated UHF reader, not a bolted-on sled

The most consequential detail for RFID users is that the UHF reader is built into the device rather than added as a snap-on sled. Sleds work, but they add weight, a second battery to charge, a pairing step and another failure point in the hands of a seasonal worker on a Saturday shift. A single unit that reads RAIN RFID tags, scans barcodes and runs the warehouse management or store app removes the awkward handover between devices during a cycle count, and it means one asset to manage, image and support.

Bluebird credits the reader’s performance to Impinj Gen X. Impinj’s current performance feature set for RAIN RFID is Gen2X, released broadly to the industry in December 2024, and that is the obvious reference point. Gen2X is not a new air interface standard. It uses optional and extended behaviour within the Gen2 protocol that a compatible reader chip and compatible tag chips negotiate between them, with the aim of pulling more tags out of a population in fewer seconds and at greater range. Impinj’s own published figures for a Gen2X-enabled handheld put it at 98 per cent of items inventoried in 13 seconds, against 79 per cent in standard Gen2 mode over the same window.

That gap is what handheld RFID lives or dies on. Stock accuracy work is time-boxed by how long a colleague can realistically spend walking an aisle, so a faster read rate is not a specification-sheet nicety, it decides whether a store counts weekly or monthly. The caveat worth stating is that the biggest gains arrive when the tag population is also Gen2X-capable, which in practice means the newer Impinj endpoint ICs. On a mixed or legacy tag estate the device falls back to standard Gen2 behaviour and reads perfectly well, just without the headline uplift.

Two frequencies, three faces

Alongside the UHF reader, the X40 carries 3-face NFC, meaning the high-frequency antenna can be presented from more than one face of the device. Bluebird positions this for payments, ID checking and card emulation. In a store or a hospitality setting that matters more than it sounds, because a colleague holding a device in a pistol grip for tag reading should not have to rotate it to take a contactless payment or read an NFC staff badge. Having UHF for bulk item-level inventory and NFC for one-to-one interactions in the same handheld covers most of the tag types a retail or logistics operation actually encounters.

AMOLED and the rest of the hardware

An AMOLED panel in a rugged enterprise device is a genuine first. Enterprise handhelds have stayed on LCD largely because of cost, burn-in risk with static application chrome and the durability question. The trade is worth it for outdoor legibility, since AMOLED contrast holds up in a yard or a loading bay, and for power, because dark application interfaces draw less current on an emissive panel. Battery matters on a device that spends its day powering an RF transmit chain.

• Qualcomm QCM6490 processor, an industrial-grade platform with on-device AI capability and long-term software support
• 6.11-inch AMOLED display, which Bluebird says offers 26 per cent more screen space
• 5G and Wi-Fi 6E
• Warm swap battery for shift changeovers without a reboot
• Front and rear cameras with a time-of-flight sensor for faster autofocus and multi-barcode capture
• UWB DeviceFinder, an ultra-wideband beacon that lets a lost handset be tracked down to roughly the shelf it was left on rather than the room
• 199g, 1.5m drop rating with the rugged cover, and operation from -20°C to 50°C

“The X40 sets new standards in industrial design, as recognised by its Red Dot accolade,” Kim said. “It delivers a smartphone-like experience without sacrificing the enterprise-grade security, reliability and longevity necessary in demanding environments.”

TSC Auto ID acquired Bluebird in 2024, adding enterprise mobile computing and data capture to a portfolio previously centred on thermal label printing. The X40 is a clear expression of that combination, a device that reads the tags and barcodes a TSC printer produces.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.