Fujitsu shows radiation-hardened RFID using FRAM technology

April 30, 2012 // Jean-Pierre Joosting

Fujitsu Semiconductor America (FSA) and a group of partner companies will highlight innovative radio-frequency identification (RFID) solutions using Fujitsu's Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) technology at Interphex 2012 from May 1-3 in New York City.

Joining Fujitsu at Interphex will be Verigenics (www.verigenics.com), Vizinex RFID (www.vizinexrfid.com) and Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. (www.toppan.co.jp).

"Fujitsu's high-performance FRAM technology can track medical devices and supplies, even through the gamma sterilization process," said Tong Swan Pang, senior manager of marketing at Fujitsu Semiconductor America. "The partner companies joining us at Interphex 2012 have integrated Fujitsu's FRAM into their products to provide radiation-resistant, high-performance RFID solutions for use in the medical, bio-processing, and pharmaceutical industries."

FRAM is a high-performance, low-power and non-volatile memory that combines the benefits of non-volatile memories (Flash and EEPROM) with high-speed RAM (SRAM and DRAM). Compared to other nonvolatile memories, key advantages of FRAM include a fast read / write speed (around 150 nanoseconds), low power consumption (more than 200 times lower than EEPROM), and high endurance (10 billion read/write cycles). This tamper-resistant, secure memory is not affected by magnetic fields. Most important for medical and pharmaceutical applications, FRAM is radiation-resistant. FRAM data is protected against up to 50 kGy gamma ray sterilization, more than twice the typical dosage used in medical applications.

Combined with RFID technologies, FRAM simplifies the task of assuring that vital medical and pharmaceutical products are safe. FRAM overcomes the serious limitation of conventional RFID tags that use EEPROM, a memory technology that can be compromised by small doses of radiation. Since the ferroelectric material at the heart of Fujitsu's FRAM technology is inherently radiation hardened, it can easily withstand the typical gamma ray sterilization.

Fujitsu offers HF and UHF RFID products with embedded FRAM that outperforms conventional EEPROM/Flash based RFID chips and is better suited for medical and pharmaceutical applications. The FerVID FRAM RFID family, unlike conventional RFID tags, features high speed data transfer rate for both reading and writing over long distances.

The FerVID FRAM RFID family products are ISO/IEC15693, ISO/IEC 18000-3 or EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 compliant. The company offers wafers, sawn wafers or packaged chips. Derivatives with combined contactless and contact-based SPI interfaces are available. RFID products come with capacities ranging from 256 Bytes to 64k Bytes of FRAM.

http://us.fujitsu.com/semi/fram

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