IEEE RFID 2026 - Keynote Speakers

 

The Evolution of Chipless RFID

Richard Ribón Fletcher, PhD.

Research Scientist, MIT
Visiting Scientist, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Research Faculty, Massachusetts General Hospital

 

Abstract

     While the electromagnetic response of materials has been studied for at least 200 years, the field we now know as “Chipless RFID” was created in the 1990s out of a need for a low-cost (<$0.05) RFID tag. Throughout the late 20th century, we witnessed the emergence of materials for radio-wave backscatter, such as radar chaffe, and 1-bit tags for Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) for library books and store security. However, multi-bit passive RFID tags could only be created with semiconductor logic ICs; and machines did not exist to be able to handle tiny IC chips and convert them to low-cost labels. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a flurry of research in chipless RFID spanning a very wide range of frequencies (77 Hz to 26 GHz) and physical mechanisms. By the late 2000s, the manufacturing problem of low-cost IC labels was mostly solved, and interest in chipless multi-bit RFID waned; however, the physical mechanisms of chipless RFID were adopted by the RFID community as a way to make crude RFID sensors.  By the late 2010s, interest in chipless sensors also waned, as more commercial RFID IC chips emerged with support for external sensors and integrated A/D converters.  

      As with chip-based RFID, the academic field of chipless RFID that exists today has migrated to operation predominantly in the UHF and low-GHz microwave bands, with the market for RFID now dominated by chip-based solutions.  However, a persistent market for chipless RFID has continued to remain in the fields of anti-counterfeiting and extreme environments where chip-based solutions cannot be used.

     In this presentation, I will give a short review of the evolution of chipless RFID and the different families of tags. I will also present an example commercial success story of a chipless RFID sensor tag design that I patented in 1996, which was licensed to biomedical companies and is still being used today as a biomedical implant to monitor pulmonary arterial pressure in people with congestive heart failure, and which continues to save many thousands of lives yearly and continues to save significant medical costs for hospitals.  

     Even though the “golden age” of chipless RFID may be in the past, many opportunities still remain for new types of chipless RFID to meet demanding application requirements. New types of low-cost RFID reader designs, signal processing, and artificial intelligence now enables access to new materials signatures; and new types of electro-optical and smart materials now provide new mechanisms for encoding information. While the commercial and academic RFID field seems mired in UHF back-scatter technologies, it is imperative to break out of this thought bubble and continue to explore other frequencies of operation, other types of electromagnetic coupling, other types of representation besides frequency, and other types of materials. Several research groups, including the MIT Auto-ID Lab, have also begun to explore “Hybrid” RFID tags, which combine both chip and chipless components to create new families of RFID labels. The field of chipless RFID has also taught us that chipless signatures exist naturally in many materials and devices in our environment. By designing a “Smart Reader” that can operate at all RF frequencies, as well as optical frequencies, ultrasound, and molecular sensing in the form of olfaction, it is now possible to consider “Smart Reader” appliances that employ detection methods that are not only chipless, but also “tagless,” in order to automatically identify and sense the objects, materials, food, and living things in our environment.  The future is only limited by our imagination.

Speaker Bio:

Rich Fletcher began his work on radio-frequency interrogation of materials as an undergrad researcher at MIT, building portable electronics for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), while pursuing dual undergraduate degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and completing his undergrad thesis work on electromagnetic simulations for the MIT Bates linear particle accelerator.  Rich Fletcher was a graduate student in Physics at UC Santa Barbara and worked at superconductor company STI, while awaiting the start of his military service.  Rich Fletcher worked for five years as a research scientist at the US Air Force Materials Laboratory, Electromagnetic Materials Division, where he made thin film high-temperature superconductors and designed and fabricated passive microwave filters and ultra-high-Q microwave resonators. At that time, Dr. Fletcher also participated in the government working group that allocated RF frequencies for the new emerging field of RFID.  With this experience, he was recruited by Prof Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, to lead the development of low-cost RFID tags and RFID sensors using smart materials. Rich Fletcher’s began his academic chipless RFID work in 1994 with sponsor Proctor and Gamble and Kevin Ashton, who later joined MIT as executive director of the MIT Auto-ID Center and also coined the term “Internet of Things.”  During his 8 years as a graduate student, Rich Fletcher filed more than 10 patents on chipless RFID and presented oral papers at IEEE Magnetics Society, Materials Research Society, and IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society meetings.  In 1996, he presented Chipless RFID at the first IEEE Auto-ID Conference, which was the pre-cursor to the current IEEE RFID conference. After graduation, Rich Fletcher founded the RFID consulting company, TagSense, Inc., to design new types of chipless and chip-based RFID sensors, and to create new patented RFID technologies for industry and government sponsors, including Motorola, Becton-Dickinson, 3M, MasterCard, and NASA. Over the years, Dr. Fletcher worked on a wide variety of unpublished and confidential projects, including the RFID reader for the world’s first all-printed RFID tag (with Kovio), first-generation RFID readers for contactless payments (with MasterCard) and the world’s smallest EPC Gen2 UHF RFID Reader (the original Nano-UHFTM), which was part of the first EPC Gen2 mobile phone in 2006 (with Nokia).  A spin-off company from TagSense, FreshTemp, was acquired by IoT company Digi in 2016 for cold-chain and food safety monitoring. In 2015, Dr. Fletcher re-joined MIT full-time as a Research Scientist, and founded a research lab at MIT called the Mobile Technology Lab, focusing on developing IoT systems for health and environmental sensing. With Prof. Roz Picard at MIT, Dr. Fletcher designed and patented early wearable electronic sensors and AI-driven mobile health interventions, which was later commercialized as a company, Empatica. Over the past decade, Dr. Fletcher and his group at MIT have expanded the field of RFID to include multi-modal sensing, including multi-spectral light and sound, and expanded the use of these signals to probe living biological systems, including plants, animals, and humans, to perform neuromodulation, with applications for improvement of brain health, human performance, and sleep. Dr. Fletcher’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, Vodafone, the Tata Trust, and the NASA SBIR program.

 

RFID everywhere, all the time

Rafael Pous, PhD.

Full professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Director of Innovation, Keonn Technologies

Abstract:

In 2000, Professor Sanjay Sarma, founder of the Auto-ID Center, co-authored the white paper “The Networked Physical World – Proposals for Engineering the Next Generation of Computing, Commerce & Automatic Identification.” It articulated the following vision:

“The Auto-ID Center envisions a world in which all electronic devices are networked and every object, whether it is physical or electronic, is electronically tagged with information pertinent to that object. We envision the use of physical tags that allow remote, contactless interrogation of their contents; thus, enabling all physical objects to act as nodes in a networked physical world…”

While the Center’s stated mission was “creating the infrastructure, recommending the standards, and identifying the automated identification applications for a networked physical world,” the widespread adoption of that infrastructure and those standards depended on a much broader ecosystem of stakeholders.

The adoption of Auto-ID technologies and standards by GS1, the global organization responsible for most supply chain standards, together with their continued evolution and subsequent regulatory approval by authorities such as the FCC and ETSI, laid the foundation for large-scale industrial deployment.

Now, 26 years later, we can look back and ask: what progress has been made toward enabling all physical objects to act as nodes in a networked physical world?

In this presentation, I will argue that RFID, as originally defined by the Auto-ID Labs, has far exceeded initial expectations. I will show how, in the most advanced current deployments, objects are no longer detected only occasionally and at discrete locations, but can be detected pervasively and continuously: everywhere, all the time. As a result, RFID-tagged objects can in these cases be considered permanent nodes in a physical network.

I will also present examples of how this physical network can be combined with other sensors, such as cameras and ultra-wideband (UWB), using AI-enabled sensor fusion to generate a digital twin of physical reality, a rich, dynamic dataset representing the state and evolution of objects, people, and their interactions.

In the digital world, interactions of people with digital objects, “clicks”, and their AI-driven analysis (“clickstream analysis”) have been a key driver of the success of most online businesses, particularly in the growth of e-commerce. In an analogous way, the use of RFID and sensor fusion to detect “cricks” (a term we coined as a portmanteau of “clicks” and “brick-and-mortar”) enables AI, physical AI, to analyze, optimize, and predict the evolution of the physical world in specific contexts, especially logistics and retail.

RFID everywhere, all the time, is no longer a vision. It is already being deployed and is becoming an essential element in a world where all objects, people, and information systems are permanently connected.

Speaker Bio:

Rafael Pous obtained dual M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering and Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). He later earned an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate studies were funded by Fulbright and Schlumberger fellowships. During this period, he conducted research on numerical methods in electromagnetics, novel antenna design, and superconductivity applied to communication circuits.

He then joined the faculty at UPC, where he taught and led research groups for 16 years. His work resulted in publications on advanced numerical methods in electromagnetics, superconductor-based electro-optical modulators for optical communications, and fractal antennas. He is a co-author of the first patent on fractal antennas, a technology that gave rise to the company Fractus, whose innovations are now present in most mobile phones.

During his tenure at UPC, he co-founded two companies. The first, The Information Highway Group, was a key player in the early years of the Internet, developing the software infrastructure for the world’s first online university, as well as some of the earliest online banking platforms, online marketplaces, and e-commerce sites, working with both startups and large corporations. The second company, AIDA Centre, was a pioneer in deploying the UHF RFID technology and standards developed by the Auto-ID Center (later Auto-ID Labs) in commercial applications across logistics, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare. The company led what was at the time the largest deployment of UHF RFID readers, a project for the Spanish Postal Service that was eventually adopted by the Universal Postal Union.

He continued his academic career at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain), where he has been a faculty member for the past 17 years. During this time, he gradually shifted his research focus toward RFID, robotics, and the Internet of Things.

Just prior to joining UPF, he co-founded Keonn Technologies, a company that develops and supplies RFID-based solutions for the retail industry, including inventory systems (handheld readers, smart shelves, robots, and overhead readers), loss prevention, payment, and customer engagement solutions. Keonn is widely regarded as a world leader in RFID solutions for retail, offering one of the industry’s broadest portfolios and serving customers in more than 60 countries across all continents. The company has achieved the world’s largest deployment of overhead RFID readers for perpetual inventory in terms of number of stores, customers, and geographic reach. Keonn was recently acquired by Novanta, a Nasdaq-listed company based in Boston.

As a Full Professor at UPF and Director of Innovation at Keonn, Rafael Pous leads research and innovation initiatives that combine RFID with complementary technologies such as computer vision, RTLS, and AI. His work focuses on developing sensor-fusion solutions that push the limits of data accuracy and fidelity, enabling new use cases that are set to transform the retail industry.