Patent Application
20150076235
The present invention is related to a chipless nanotube RFID system for anti-counterfeiting, protection, and the authorization of such brand products as branded spirits, liquors, and wines, safety-critical items such as food, and life-threatening products such as medicines.
High Valuable and branded products are facing serious counterfeiting issues, especially with the global supplier chain and economic growth. Huge losses are occurring daily for the companies who are making or selling the products. On the other hand, consumes are also the victims of faked high brand products. There are serious safety issues and sometime life threatening crimes due to faked medicines or toxic foods from counterfeiting products. Consumers, manufacturers, and governments all call for anti-counterfeit innovative solutions.
Prior arts provide conventional protective techniques and methods. U.S. Pat. No. 5,729,365 disclosed the optical holograms for authentication and tamper-protection. It is common to provide a printed label for anti-counterfeiting and authentication.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been widely used for automatic identification, asset tracking, and counterfeiting of brand products, etc. Most of these RFID tags or transponders include a chip for storing the item information and a radio antenna for wireless communication or data transmission between the reader or the interrogator and the tag. Prior art of such tags can be illustrated in
Another deficient in current chipped RFID tag with antennas is the un-separable between the chip and antennas [2]. Once separated after manufacturing, the data inside the chip is not readable since the signal path from the chip to the antenna is broken. Although the feature can be used for anti-counterfeiting of the liquid bottle with a sealing cap in a destructive way [3, U.S. Pat. No. 7,176,796], the reuse or recycling of the original products become unpractical after the first use. There are also the quality and reliability programs for the customers to return products with any manufacturing defects, which requires the identification of original manufacturers and repair/replacement responsibilities. There are therefore needs for non-destructive protection and identification while providing the anti-counterfeiting function.
As a result, there is a strong demand and practical requirement for the antennas or resonators that can work at multiple frequencies, multiple locations, and much shorter radio frequency lengths. It is also desirable that the separable antenna elements. It is even more advantageous for providing nondestructive methods for anti-counterfeiting and product recycling. The huge consumer market calls for the chipless tags that are capable of anti-counterfeiting and data safety with small size for item-level RFID applications. Finally, it needs to be manufactured by low cost technologies.
Present invention provides unique solutions for anti-counterfeiting by using chipless nanotube patterns as the RFID tag. These nanotubes can be the resonator elements with different length and patterns when the RFID reader activates them in the right RF conditions. The sufficient bits can be achieved by the plurality of nanotube antennas or resonators with very small size in multiple antenna combinations and two-dimensional patterns or even one-dimensional patterns just like traditional bar codes. The radio frequencies of these nanotubes can reach millimeter wave range or tens to hundreds GHz frequency bands with each resonator element length from millimeters down to microns. Furthermore, the nanotube resonators can be fabricated by low-cost manufacturing methods such as printing technologies. The special fabrication substrate with the nanotube dispersion method is disclosed in the embodiments of another invention [4, Application No 61/698,657]. The chipless nanotube RFID tag is small, transparent, and even invisible, making extra safety for anti-counterfeiting purposes physically. Instead of destructive method for anti-counterfeiting, we disclose the recoverable anti-counterfeiting tag with at least two pieces of the antenna elements. One part is on or inside the bottle cap and another part is located on or inside the bottle body so that the two antenna elements must be the one combined ID enabled by the software that will be our another invention. We also provide three pieces and one tag ID solution for security protection combining both destructive and recoverable designs. Therefore, the multi-level purposes of anti-counterfeiting, authorization, brand protection, even recycling, and repairing/reworking are all served well by this invention.
The accompanying figures, where are incorporated in and form part of the specifications, serve to further illustrate various embodiments and to explain various principles and advantages all in accordance with the present invention. The foregoing aspects and the others will be readily appreciated by the skilled artisans from the following descriptions.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements or nanotubes in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to actual scales. For instance, some of these nanotube elements in the figures may be exaggerated relatively to other elements to help to improve understanding of the embodiments of the present invention.
For the purpose of the disclosure and embodiments, the term “nanotube” in this invention is meant to include any high aspect ratio linear or curved nano-scaled structures, including single-walled, double-walled, and multi-walled nanotubes, semiconducting or conductive nanotubes, nanowires, nanotube bundles, nanotube yarns, nanowires, and nano-columns, and nano-beams which can be used as resonators or can be made to vibrate in an electrical or/and electromagnetic fields. These preferably have a length from 1 micron, to 1 millimeter, and to tens of centimeters, depending on the radio frequencies and the tag size requirements. The diameters have a width or diameter from 0.2 nm to 1 micron, and to 1 millimeter. Examples of the present nanotubes also include such metallic as Ni, Cu, Ag, and Au nanowires. Preferred carbon nanotubes have metallic or conducting properties with one, two, or multi-walls and directional or anisotropic conductivity.
For the purpose of present invention, the term “electromagnetic signal” is used to mean either electromagnetic waves moving through air or dielectric or electrons moving through wires or both in any a frequency or a frequency range.
For present disclosure, the term “radio” is used to mean the wireless transmission or communication through electromagnetic waves in any a frequency or a frequency range from 1 MHz to 1 GHz, and to 1 THz. Preferred millimeter waves are frequencies from 30 GHz to 300 GHz.
For present disclosure, the term “tag” is used to mean a layer of nanotube patterns and a substrate with any shape of an oval, a square, a rectangle, a triangle, a circle, or polygons, and any size from 1 micron to 1 millimeter, and to tens of centimeters. It can also be multi-layers with different nanotube patterns and substrate materials.
[1] [1] U.S. Pat. No. 7,551,141, Hadley et al., RFID Strap Capacitively Coupled and Method of Making Same, Jun. 23, 2009.
[2] U.S. Pat. No. 6,891,474, Fletcher et al., Electromagnetic Identification Lable for Anti-counterfeiting, Authorization, and Tamper-Protection, May 10, 2005.
[3] U.S. Pat. No. 7,176,796, Chen et al., Anti-counterfeiting Sealing Cap with Identification Capability, Feb. 13, 2007.
[4] US Provident Patent Application No 61/698,657, Qian, Zhengfang, Nanotube Patterns for Chipless RFID Tags and Methods of Making the Same, Sep. 9, 2012.
[5] Zhengfang Qian, Patent Application: Coding and Decoding Methods of Nanotube Chipless RFID Tags.
