Technologies for secure RFID authentication of medicinal pills and capsules

This paper addresses the problem of counterfeiting of medicines in the form of pills and capsules by proposing a novel micron-scale secure RFID tag that would be inserted into the pill or capsule during the manufacturing process. For secure identification and authentication, a tagged pill or capsule would be scanned by a small inexpensive RFID reader, and key medicine information such as the drug type, manufacturer, and expiration date would be retrieved from a secure database. This application is enabled by an RFID tag integrated circuit (IC) incorporating an on-chip ID storage and custom security engine with a novel on-chip antenna (OCA) structure that has the potential to achieve an order of magnitude greater working distance at constant power level when compared to prior art passive single-chip silicon RFID tags with OCAs. This paper describes the proposed solution in detail and presents analysis, electromagnetic simulation, and circuit simulation results supporting its design and performance.