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Thin, Flexible Printable Battery For Smartcards

Posted by chrisd on from the don't-hate-me-because-I'm-well-engineered dept.

cornflux writes "This would be a nice way to power a really smart smartcard: Power Paper, Ltd. has created an alkaline-like energy cell that is (among other things) thin, flexible, and "green." Furthermore, it is printable via a silk-screening process onto paper, plastic, and other flexible materials. ABCNEWS.com has the story."

3 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. It's actually quite important... by jonatha · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...inasmuch as one of the main deterrents IMHO to more widespread use of smartcards for digital cash and suchlike is the ease with which anything on the card can be cracked. Having power onboard a smartcard would allow it to be much more resistant to physical attack than it is at present (e.g. it could detect intrusion and wipe any sensitive information).

    It also makes it much simpler to ensure the integrity of the information on the card and so simplify the programming model. (At present, the card - and any code that it runs or that it interacts with - has to gracefully handle removal of power at any time. Doing that correctly is quite tricky...)

    --
    The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
  2. Thin Film Rechargeable Batteries by inKubus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Front Edge Technology supposedly makes the worlds thinnest battery, however. And these are rechargeable.

    Their website has the complete specs, power dissapation curves and more.

    --
    Cool! Amazing Toys.
  3. Re:"Smart" Luggage Tags? by hbackert · · Score: 2, Informative
    The tags the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.

    I read some articles about RFID tags and air lines use them already. It's after all faster to read them in a tunnel then pointing a laser at them. Those tags turn and bend and RF is much better at reading the ID.

    The benefit of a passive RFID tag is it's cheap. The drawback is, the maximum reading distance is rather small (some meters).

    Active, power driven ID tagscan send out their ID much further away. Given enough power, several hundred meters.

    Now that makes it useless for air lines (at least I cannot see a reason why they would like to do that), but for other services it might be useful. Containers in a harbour/shipping station come into my mind. They are too big to put into a tunnel, but they can carry a small battery without any problems.

    This small printed battery thing now makes this battery small, flat, flexible and cheap, which means this active RFID tags can be deployed in more articles.

    After all, you don't have to use them and passive ones will be cheaper anyway, so it's just one more choice you have.

    Sounds ok for me.