Smooth Solutions for Harsh Conditions: Smartrac Expands its NFC Portfolio

Amsterdam (The Netherlands), June 14, 2018 – Focused on providing innovative IoT solutions and latest technologies, Smartrac is extending its portfolio of NFC products twofold. While its recently introduced Circus™ Flex and Dura tags offer enhanced environmental resistance for brand and retail applications, Smartrac’s all-new On-Metal products allow for efficient tagging of metal surfaces in industrial and automotive applications.  

Smartrac’s Circus™ Flex and its non-identical twin Circus^TM Dura are specifically designed to offer enhanced environmental resistance for demanding brand and retail applications. Sharing an IC and antenna design, Circus Dura excels in robustness through stiffness, while Circus Flex excels in robustness through flexibility.

Innovative technologies for different applications: Circus Flex…

The latter’s striking feature is the protection of the IC area using a special “glop top” seal, which shields the IC and its connection to the antenna. The tag responds to customer demand for highly protected flexible tags, while Circus Dura remains the optimum solution for highly protected stiff tags. Maximum stiffness and flexibility exclude each other, and with the advent of these two highly stress-resistant inlays and tags, brands and retailers can choose what best suits their needs.

…and the On-Metal product range

Companies across a great variety of industries such as industrial and automotive applications have a need to tag metallic parts, tools, machines, equipment or even metal doors and hence have a strong demand for flexible, easy-to-handle, on-metal NFC inlays for wide-ranging surfaces. Smartrac is one of the first suppliers to fully meet that demand by introducing ferrite-based NFC inlays that are flexible enough to suit roll-to-roll manufacturing processes. 

Flexibility for efficient manufacturing and diverse surfaces

Combining flexible ferrite material and performance-optimized antenna designs on metal surfaces, Smartrac’s new, super-thin, ferrite-based inlays can now be produced by applying a layer of this material to the inlay, which isolates the magnetic field from the metal surface. This means that, due to their superior flexibility compared to conventional ferrite-based NFC tags from other manufacturers, Smartrac’s On-Metal NFC inlays and tags can now be used on a much wider range of metallic surfaces – concave, convex, possibly even roughened, rugged or grainy surfaces – and read by a mobile phone app or NFC reader. In addition, converters can overprint the inlays if required.

Opening the door to countless applications

The introduction of on-metal NFC products to Smartrac’s portfolio opens the door to multiple applications involving metal surfaces that need to be identified or interacted with. These includes asset management; product authentication; grey market detection; warranty activation; planned service and maintenance instructions; spare parts ordering; product feedback for product development, and many more. On top of that, consumer goods made from metal can now be NFC-enabled as well, resulting in potentially endless possibilities.

Solutions leveraging the new products’ capabilities

“By extending our NFC portfolio in response to the needs of our customers, such as brand owners and retailers as well as industrial and automotive clients, we are not only expanding Smartrac’s position as the NFC technology and innovation leader. We are also broadening our range of customer-oriented RFID-based Internet of Things solutions by leveraging our new products’ capabilities”, said Matti Tavilampi, Director of RFID Sensors and Products, Global Product Management at Smartrac.

Technologies adaptable to suit many products

The ferrite layer option will be made available across a range of Smartrac HF/NFC products, and will initially be offered for Circus and BullsEye antenna types equipped with NXP’s NTAG213 IC.

BullsEye On-Metal and Circus On-Metal will become available in July 2018, while Circus Flex and Circus Dura tags are available in large quantities as of now.

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