June 25, 2008 – PART 2 – Hitachi’s Gary Andrechak shares the latest Japanese RFID developments where the chips get downright microscopic while METI finances memory increases.


Tell us about the tiny chips Hitachi has developed.

ANDRECHAK: Mu-chip is the name. If you look at our product name, it is the Greek letter for U, which is the symbol for micron, the very small unit measure. µ-chip was named µ-chip because it is the smallest RFID chip commercially available at the moment. µ-chip Dust is the same circuitry that is on the µ-chip currently. It is just in a much smaller chip package.

Mu-chip is 0.4 millimeter square because at the time of its development, that was the smallest size handling equipment that the semi conductor world could work with. So, there is a lot of wasted real estate on that 0.4 millimeter square chip. If you shrink it down a bit more, and remove most of the extra space between the chips on the wafer, you end up with a chip that is much, much smaller—at 0.05 mm square. We call it µ-chip dust or µ-chip powder.

Is this UHF or HF solution?

ANDRECHAK: It is microwave. It is 2.45 gigahertz, which is the same frequency as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

In our case, maximum read distance, following FCC regulations for power output on the reader side, is about a maximum of twelve inches. There are some microwave or 2.45 GHz technologies out there that are longer ranged; but the Hitachi chip was designed specifically for short range.

Obviously if it is something going into a high value item for item validation, you don’t want to be able to read it from across the room.

Are all of the µ-chips 2.45GHz or are there some that are different?

ANDRECHAK: The standard µ-chip product that we have been talking about is a 2.45 GHz product. The reason why is it 2.45 GHz aside from requiring a smaller antenna at the higher frequency is because at the time of µ-chip’s inception, there was no UHF band available for RFID in Japan. .

That has since changed with UHF supply chain applications in Japan. Japan government has opened a portion of bandwidth for UHF RFID applications around 950 MHz.

Hitachi is involved in another RFID product developed by a consortium of Japanese firms called Hibiki. Hibiki’s development funding came from a grant by Japan’s Ministry of Economy and Trade (METI) to build a low cost supply chain type RFID system based on ISO 18000-6C air communication standard. Hitachi is marketing the UHF band RFID RKT132 series chip based in the result of Hibiki Project of METI.

And it is sold by Hitachi similarly to the µ-chip chip, but it is a different type of chip entirely?

ANDRECHAK: Right. It is an EPC Gen-2 type chip. It is much larger and has larger memory on the chip. A traditional EPC Gen-2 chip contains a 96 bit number. Hibiki holds a total of 2128 bits

And is it being used now much in the supply chain or are there applications?

It is being, primarily used for supply chain type applications. It is better suited for applications where there is need for the added value of the Hibiki extra memory or distributed or partitioned use of that extra chip memory.

So you would be selling this mostly to an OEM rather than to the end user market?

ANDRECHAK: It could go either way. It depends on, what the core application is and who the end user is. Let's say this is for an item level automotive part application where you may want to put this tag on the item and be able to record calibration settings that went into it, when it was manufactured ,what its expected life span is, what its warranty terms might be. All that additional information can fit into the Hibiki chip and stay with the part for its life in the car


Gary, on the Mu-chip, on the smaller one, the 0.4 millimeter size one, give me a sense in real world, compare that size to something we may think of?

ANDRECHAK: It is smaller than the size of a pin head.

That is pretty wild. You use that in item level work as well?

ANDRECHAK: The concept behind the µ-chip is to keep the tag itself as simple and uncomplicated as possible, and putting most of the complexity into the back-end system that is driving the application. It even survives gamma sterilization well beyond normal exposure levels.

As a read only technology, it is delivered to the customer ready to go and good to insert and install into items to give each one its own unique, never duplicated or changeable identification code.

What kind of items is it being used with now in the real world?

ANDRECHAK: The real world applications are all over the place. We have a manufacturer of precision plastic spheres that needs to be able to track each one individually as they are processed and tested in their lab. These items all look alike, but are slightly different. µ-chip solved the problem of auto IDing these items in mass and, with high reliability. The µ-chip inlay is inserted in the item before injection molding is completed.

Are there any commercial items that small that are using something like this?

ANDRECHAK: µ-chip is best suited for industrial applications for small sized items; some kind of work in process or use where you are trying to track something that is high value or has some kind of high risk that must be mitigated.

Basically, µ-chip has three sweet spots. Authentication which verifying the item is not false or imitation, such as DVDs, tickets, ID cards, pharmaceuticals. Traceability, which is validation of the item’s history, for items like life sciences specimens, law enforcement evidence, product diversion. And Work-in-Process for managing and controlling manufacturing process, work flow control, production yield management, process control validation, failure analysis.

As for commercial use, it was used as an anti-counterfeiting inclusion for 25 million admission tickets at the Aichi World Expo in Aichi, Japan a few years back. It’s used currently in China for similar event purposes.