In 2006, Hitachi developed a 0.15mm-sized RFID chip

[rwmj]

The most amazing thing about this (and another tiny RFID chip that was on HN recently) is not that you can print them on wafers, but that you can cut up the wafers and handle these tiny dies. Imagine you manufactured sugar, but had to manipulate each sugar grain separately.

[vlabakje90]

It thought it was an interesting analogy, so I looked up the size of a typical sugar crystal. It's between 450 and 600 microns. So these chips are 3 to 4 times smaller than that even.

[riedel]

I was in a project with MAN Roland and the university of Dresden at the same time and the most important thing is roll to roll printing. This actually works well if you do not need an external antenna. What was the holy grrail at the time was to print also the antennas, get a decent coupling and then actually also do item and not only batch level tracking of the packaging you would print. Particular Pharma was really interested in terms of anticounterfeiting at low cost.

[ipdashc]

I have always wondered how this works (along with wire bonding), especially in an economic way.

Chips being cheap makes sense at the lithography / wafer level because sure, you can stamp out thousands of them at once. But once you need to dice them up, bond wires to them, and package them... how on earth do you do that so efficiently that each chip can be sold for fractions of a cent?

[dfox]

If you want the bare chips and not full assembled labels the usual packaging is uncut wafer and cutting out and handling the individual dies is your problem.

[colechristensen]

How big is the saw if you're cutting up 150 micron pieces of wafer?

[UomoNeroNero]

This is the really interesting Thing!!!! And: how they can have different ROM content (code) for each chip

[jsnsnsn]

You significantly underestimate the size of sugar crystals ^^

[progbits]

Still needs an antenna tuned to the RFID frequency which will be much larger than the chip. It's cool engineering but doesn't mean you can have a working sub-mm tag.

[stavros]

No, but the chip does usually put a cap on the thinness of the whole assembly (e.g. for cards). This means you can have a paper-thin NFC sticker (which we have now, I guess).

[xadhominemx]

The chip is still the majority of the cost of the inlay, so making a smaller chip is the key to driving total down and unlocking new use cases.

[kazinator]

Also, you can find previous announcements of Hitachi's μ-Chip series. In 2001, evidently, they put out a 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm chip.

Not being programmable at all and just transmitting a 128 bit number would help get the size down.

Let's compare to a Monza R6 chip that was introduced in 2014, I think. This thing is 0.464 by 0.442 mm according to the datasheet, so quite a bit larger even than the 2001 read-only μ-Chip.

But it it has a two-way communication with the controller, and writable memory. You can enable password protection and such.

The newer M800 series is smaller: 0.247 mm × 0.362 mm, but still larger than the 2005 read-only μ-Chip. There are more features: fatter datasheet. Things like a privacy mode: tag remains radio silent unless it sees a specific 32 bit code from the reader.

You know how you can hold a totally unrelated RFID tag to a door reader and have the reader beep, indicating it has communicated with the tag? This looks like the feature that would prevent that. That could be useful.

[sen-wass]

> tag remains radio silent unless it sees a specific 32 bit code from the reader.

So you could spray sticky rfid chips into an enemy’s hair, undetectable when scanned, and later on you could send the correct signal to identify enemies in the room. Later their hair would be trimmed, leaving no trace.

Aside from the cool privacy aspect, it seems like it would be cool to:

- Attach to insects to later use a detector to find their homes.

- Coat it and eat it to track your digestion.

- Use it in a miniature tornado model or wind tunnel along with a radio spectrograph to have cool visualizations.

- Embed in paintings, 3D models, clothing labels, and more to verify authenticity, get serial numbers, or track inventory.

- Drop a trail of them behind you so others can follow the trail and find you!

[ashleyn]

In an early example of conspiracy theories that would eventually envelop social media, I actually remember internet commenters pointing to the previous generation of these as supposed "proof" that the government was embedding RFID chips in banknotes to track people (following a blog article by Alex Jones): https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/03/02/0535225/do-your-20-...

[inanutshellus]

If I worked for VISA's marketing team I'd want to spread FUD like this and "XX% of dollar bills have cocaine on them; protect your children with a youth MasterCard!"

[littlestymaar]

What never cease to amaze me with conspiracy theorists, is that they keep inventing preposterous “conspiracies” while being totally oblivious about the real world. Like why bother putting chips in banknotes when the government could track everyone in real time through their smartphone.

[alliao]

honestly given how long ago that was I'd not be surprised if everything's completely peppered with chips... one from the manufacturer, one from inventory, one from logistic, one from corporate espionage agent, one from foreign adversary state actor sky really is the limit with these. didn't parmesan put some chips in their cheese too?

[janice1999]

Sounds crazy but car and truck tires have had RFID chips for years. I assume most people would be surprised by that.

https://www.tirereview.com/michelin-connect-car-tires-rfid-2...

[xadhominemx]

The ICs are tiny but the antenna are much larger.

[transcriptase]

Imagine if the crazies were right and the Covid vaccines actually did have RFID.

[tiku]

This is what is in euro bills right?

[paulgerhardt]

Years later we put a newer version of this chip with a secure element into Bitcoin bills.[1]

Hand waiving a lot of the details, each note basically becomes a hardware wallet with some additional features to prevent double spending.

[1] https://offline.cash

[net01]

There were talks, but they didn't go through with it.

[notachatbot123]

Is it possible to buy and use such tiny chips?

[IndrekR]

Used to develop readers based on similar UHF chips (868 MHz in EU). They were quite expensive compared to printed bar codes those were replacing. Also large. With (folded) antennas we are still talking about 40*10 mm minimum for the label. You can not use them on metal surfaces. Readers nearby will interfere as it works by EM wave backscattering, unlike NFC which is essentially a transformer (with electric field intentionally supressed usually). I think it still is a solution looking for problem. QR codes are cheap and NFC (14 MHz) readers are everywhere.

[1oooqooq]

presented in 2005 World Exposition, a time where hydrogen fuel cell was the whole future.

[bitwize]

Oh, great. The New World Order can easily slip these into a dose of vaccine and you can be tagged for tracking without ever knowing it!

[mhb]

So that's what's in the smallpox vaccine.