This unclonable chipless RFID (UCR) tag enables pharmaceutical companies to trace products at the pill level through their supply chains. Today's pharmaceutical industry suffers from product theft and counterfeiting. These issues not only damage the profit and reputation of pharmaceutical companies, but also cause a serious threat to public health. Counterfeit drugs alone generate an estimated $75 billion in revenue each year and have caused over 100,000 deaths across the globe. Available track-and-trace techniques, such as barcodes and QR codes, require individual scanning via direct line of sight and are easy to duplicate. RFID track-and-trace systems, on the other hand, are much more effective because they do not require direct line-of-sight scanning, they can accommodate batch scanning, and they are more difficult to duplicate. However, available chip-based RFID tags are expensive to manufacture, making them impractical for tracking low-cost items. Alternatively, chipless RFID tags offer several benefits including low-cost manufacturing, ability to print directly onto the packaging, and insusceptibility to ambient temperature changes. While these benefits improve pharmaceutical tracking, available chipless RFID tags are both complex to manufacture and vulnerable to cloning.
Researchers at the University of Florida have developed an unclonable chipless RFID tag that traces pharmaceutical products at the pill level. This UCR tag utilizes a layered track-and-trace system to improve product security and quality assurance. The system includes an external tag on each cavity of a tablet blister pack and another tag inside the pill itself. This pill-level tag creates an inseparable connection between RFID tags and the products, eliminating the effectiveness of attempted counterfeit drug substitutions. This UCR technology can be adapted to track other small valuable products, such as microprocessors and fully programmed FPGAs.
Unclonable, chipless RFID tags to track and trace pharmaceuticals at the pill level
These pill-level, chipless, unclonable RFID tags comprise a cross-registration approach to ensure greater security. The tags secure to both a product and its packaging, generating a unique ID from multiple entropic sources that can't be removed. One component distributes a specific number of concentric-ring-slot resonators onto the exterior surface of each pill cavity in a blister pack. When the RFID reader transmits a plane wave to the packaged product, the copper concentric-ring-slot resonators introduce a number of resonance points into the response spectrum equal to the number of rings present. The second component works with a random quantity of nontoxic silver particles inserted into each pharmaceutical tablet. The randomness of the silver particles affects the electromagnetic field distribution when the plane wave is transmitted, further altering the frequency signature. The combined effects of the two components create unique IDs for each package and pill it contains.
