Here is a picture of these RFID chips sitting close to grains of rice (Credit: Hitachi, Ltd.).
In May, a Japanese media report said Hitachi is talking with the European Central Bank on a project to embed RFID chips in euro bank notes. Shibatani said today that such a project is not under way.
The announcement confirms that such a project will soon be technically feasible although several other potential hurdles remain, such as pricing the chips low enough to make them cost-effective and also combating growing consumer resistance to RFID.
No battery means RFIDs can be much smaller than most digital gadgets and can be placed permanently in hard-to-reach places. The pet ID implanted under the skin of my cat's neck is the size of a grain of rice, and it never needs replacing. Hitachi's new chip, which carries its own built-in antenna, takes the technology down to a new level of tiny: At less than half a millimeter square, it's about the size of a pepper flake. Yet the 128-bit ID number embedded in each Hitachi chip is big enough, in theory, to catalog every grain of sand on the world's beaches and deserts, plus every star in the known universe, several times over.
At less than 10 cents apiece in bulk, RFID tags are fast approaching a price point that makes them a viable replacement for bar code stickers. First, though, they'll have to run the same gauntlet that UPC bar codes did: Privacy gurus and paranoids alike have already declared RFID the latest incarnation of Big Brother.
