Sandtracker RFID set for public debut next month

Two 'serious trial' users scheduled to talk about 'less silicon' chips

Two trial customers of Sandtracker, the radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip maker which claims to have broken the price barrier, will be showing and talking about their applications at an RFID conference in Auckland next month.

One of Sandtracker’s partners is sports-event software company Codenz, whose managing director Murray Anderson is co-presenting with Sandtracker director Jan Hilder on November 16, the second day of the Brightstar "RFID summit".

Hilder declines to discuss either customer or their application, except to say that it is not in the usual run of supply chain tracking. “I thought since everyone else is talking about supply chain, we’d have a couple of applications from left of centre,” she says.

The Sandtracker technology uses "less silicon” than conventional RFID chips and enables the simplest RFID tags to be made for 10 New Zealand cents, Hilder claims, when major companies are still struggling with figures in single-digit US dollars.

After preliminary trials in a wide variety of challenging environments, from meat processing to coin-bag counting, Sandtracker now has four businesses trialling the technology “in anger” — which means paying for it, she says.

After initially having a single reader to receive radio signals, Sandtracker has developed a number of different kinds of reader to work in different environments, particularly those that are troublesome for ordinary RFID chips and readers.

The novel design of the chips, unfortunately, means they are not compatible with the emerging EPC worldwide standard, Hilder says; so they can’t at present be used in supply-chain applications where the goods have to move somewhere else. Sandtracker applications have to be contained within one business, “such as libraries or inventory”.

Hilder, originally an independent financial backer of Sandtracker, is listed on the Brightstar timetable as the company’s CEO. She prefers to call herself “a director” but says “I seem to be rapidly becoming chief executive.”

Several telephone calls to Codenz last week brought no response before deadline.