HP Unveils
RFID's Future Competitor
ARTICLE DATE: 07.17.06
By Natali T. Del Conte
Hewlett-Packard unveiled a memory chip the size of a tomato seed on
Monday in its Palo Alto laboratories. The tiny chip, called the
Memory Spot, can be attached unobtrusively to any object and carry
media or data.
The Memory Spot will rival RFID tags in carrying information on
movable physical objects, but HP calls it the smarter
alternative.
"It has some of the characteristics of RFID but it's very different
because it's orders of magnitude different in bandwidth," said
Howard Taub, vice president and associate director of HP
Laboratories. "It's like comparing a monkey and a human. There are
some similarities but the capabilities are very different."
The Memory Spot has a 10 megabits-per-second data-transfer rate and
can store up to 4 megabits of data, although the demonstration
chips stored only 256 kilobits. The chip has an integrated antenna,
which is why it is so much smaller than an RFID chip, which gets
most of its size from the separately attached antennae. It receives
power through inductive coupling from a special read-write device
that extracts data from the memory on the chip.
HP says that the chip will "bridge the digital and physical
worlds." Taub demonstrated picture albums with the nearly-invisible
chip attached to the borders. When a reader touched the chip, audio
from the picture was played. Taub next waved the reader over the
chip on a medicine bottle and the attached computer received the
dosage, direction, and all other pertinent information from the
prescription.
Other proposed applications include sending digital postcards with
movies and sounds like the moving pictures in a Harry Potter movie.
The chip can also be used to attach catalogs to merchandise,
resumes to business cards, and digital information to a document in
order to photocopy it without scanning.
The reading devices have yet to be developed, but Taub has hopes
that mobile phone companies and PDA manufacturers will want
in.
"A PDA is a good reader because it's got a screen and audio and
video capabilities, but cell phones are the perfect readers," Taub
said. "Everybody has one with them at all times and they can play
video and audio. But cell phones are not designed for this yet, so
the cell phone companies would have to decide if they want to be
part of the ecosystem."
Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the
Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way. "We don't want
to increase the range of contact," he said. "We think it's just
right."
Memory Spot technology works independently of Internet connection.
It is meant for physical data transmission, much like RFID,
although another fundamental difference is that the data on Memory
Spot is rewriteable whereas the majority of RFID chips are
read-only.
"In a world with infinite connection and infinite bandwidth, you
probably wouldn't need this, but I still don't have cell phone
connection here in the basement," Taub said.
HP's business divisions have not put a price approximation on
Memory Spot, particularly because they do not have a manufacturer
lined up yet. Taub estimates that the chips could cost consumers $1
each, but emphasized that this price point is pure speculation.
Because this Memory Spot is in such early phases, consumers will
not actually see or use it for at least another two to five
years.
"We're just announcing the technology right now," Taub said. "The
hard part is building the ecosystem. You have to get your readers
and writers, and I don't know how long it will take me to convince
the cell phone companies to do this. How long has RFID been around
and it's still not completely built out?"
An integral part of building the ecosystem will also involve
building new standards for Memory Spot. Taub says that they have
applied to some standards boards, although he would not say which
ones, as well as complied with FCC regulations. He said that HP
will announce the new standard in the "near future."