Conductive Printing of RFID Tag and Chip Contacting Methods for High Volume Additive Production

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm keeps pressure on constant innovation of manufacturing processes, mainly on additive technologies that can significantly reduce waste and cost of manufactured parts. Promising field for high volume, low cost and quick time to market additive fabrication method is printing. This paper briefly compares current printing technologies used for electronics fabrication, mainly for low cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC) tags, smart labels, smart packaging, sensors etc. with focus on "offset lithography". This method raises a big challenges, one of them is chip contacting method. This work summarizes current contacting methods suitable for printed electronics on flexible substrates with focus on promising contactless RFID magnetic coupling method that does not require conductive connection between chip and antenna itself.