Cheap Printed RFID Tags May Replace Barcodes
RFID tags are in many of the products that we already buy today and the promise of RFID in the future is that we may not even have to stop at the register to checkout at the store. In the future, with prolific RFID tags more powerful than what we have today, all we might need to do is walk out the door with our carts and our total would be computed automatically. Today's RFID technology, however, is prone to hacking, which was demonstrated when researchers were able to clone an RFID passport while driving by it.
Before we can get to the point where store inventories are able to be done in real-time using RFID tags, we need to have cheaper and more efficient methods of producing the tags and the tags need to hold more information and use less power. Researchers at Rice University and Sunchon National University in Korean are working on a joint project using RFID tags that are printed on a roll-to-roll process that uses inks embedded with carbon nanotubes.
