New Erase Head for RFID Thermal Rewritable Media

Abstract

Although thermal rewritable technology has been known in the printing industry for about a decade, it has been used mainly for card applications only in Japan and Europe. Usages in other applications have been less than anticipated for various reasons.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been around much longer than rewritable technology, but its usages have been becoming popular in the last several years.A new application is emerging which utilizes both of those technologies in industrial manufacturing operation known as “just-in-time” (JIT) Kanban System. Using RFID for Kanban media makes the operation more efficient as the information on the card can be retrieved beyond bar-code scanning range and electronic data on the media can be updated. One issue with electronic data on the media (card or label) update is that the media needs to be reprinted if the visible information (such as alpha-numeric and bar-code) needs to be updated while electronic data can be changed easily and almost endlessly. Regular media with memory IC chip is rather expensive and single use (print-and-discard) process is uneconomical. This is where the rewritable technology comes in, since the media can be reused (rewritten) several hundred times – the cost becomes almost a non-issue.HIT Devices, Ltd., developed an erase head specifically designed to meet the requirements of this application.