With the announcement last week that it would situate its manufacturing operations in Vermont, ASK-intTag established itself in the North American printed electronics market. A joint venture between ASK of France and WS Packaging, one of the United States’ largest narrow web packaging and converting companies, ASK-intTag will be producing contactless inlays for a range of markets that involve secure identification. The company will draw on years of experience printing RFID antennas with silver ink in Europe.

ASK is a 10-year-old company whose main focus has always been the creation of inlays with printed antennas, says Thierry Burgess, general manager of ASK-intTag. “Initially we were printing on paper,” he says, “and now we print on a wide range of substrates, including Teslin, PVC, polycarbonate sheets and rolls. We print the antennas, then use a pick-and-place technology to apply the chips directly onto the antennas. Depending on the application, we will create different kinds of products: conductor tickets for the transit industry, RFID inlays, card inlays. More recently we have been producing passport inlays, which are glued to booklets for biometric passports.”

Burgess says that the company collaborates with ink suppliers “to spec out the inks that we use, then work with them to come up with the proper characteristics that we need. Depending on the radio frequency that we need, the conductivity will differ from one chip to another.”

The inlays produced by the company utilize both HF and UHF frequencies. “Some people are specialized in HF,” he says, “using competing technologies such as wired antennas, but that technology is not suitable for UHF. To go to UHF the application needs a completely different process. Our technology is completely independent from the frequency used.” Products range from lower-end tickets up to more sophisticated uses. “At the high end are the microcontrollers,” he says. “The chips for those are quite complex, and I don’t see that technology coming for another couple of years or so.”

As with ASK in France, ASK-intTag will make use of screen printing equipment for production. The equipment, says Burgess, is manufactured in Germany. “It’s almost off-the-shelf equipment, but we customize the drying.”

Does the company plan to print the chips as well? “We are starting to think about that,” Burgess says. “For us it’s still pretty much of a science project. A number of companies are working on that, so the most prudent way for us is to get in touch with them to see how it is done. That’s only one part of our business.”

ASK-intTag is the result of a relationship that had built up over the past several years. WS Packaging Group, which was formed in 2000 by the merger of Wisconsin Label Corporation and Superior Label Systems, had been acquainted for the past several years with ASK.

“We had been talking with ASK for a couple of years about trying to license their methods,” says Terry Fulwiler, CEO of WS Packaging. “We had a couple of customers here, and thought that we could be price competitive if we could produce the tags the way they do it in France.” ASK, meanwhile, set up a sales office in the US and began to get involved with customers, which led the company to decide that having a US partner would be beneficial. “They came to us and it sounded like a good plan,” Fulwiler says. “Manufacturing in the US is a lot better than manufacturing in France and shipping the products over here.”

“WS Packaging is very complementary to ASK,” says Burgess. “They are the king of paper labels, and we are very good with paper-based inlays, so it’s a good match and it makes sense. They are a manufacturing partner, and we are a technology partner.”

WS has been engaged in RFID production and application for several years. “We see RFID as an opportunity among technologies to drive label sales,” says Wayne Richter, chief manufacturing officer for WS Packaging. “We’ve been involved with it since 2004 with a concerted effort. From the equipment side, we developed RFID application technologies, systems that performed quality checks of the tags, and ejecting the bad ones prior to applying. We sold some of the systems, but the market never got large enough. A lot of people are hand applying the tags today, especially at the pallet level.”

The RFID products that WS has been working with do not contain printed antennas. The company acquires the inlays from suppliers and inserts them into a label construction. “The quality of tags has increased dramatically over the past few years,” says Richter. “There used to be a high percentage of poor tags on a roll, and maybe only 80 percent were good. Today it’s over 98 percent.”

ASK-intTag’s US manufacturing space is 15,000 square feet at an IBM facility in Essex Junction, VT, a suburb of Burlington, the state’s largest city. Needless to say, this is good news for the state and the city. “We have started hiring people,” says Burgess. “Our plan is to start with a minimum of 15 people, and grow to 90 within three years.” The equipment arrives at the end of April, and production is scheduled to begin in July.

“One of the questions I hear is ‘Why Burlington?’,” says Burgess. “There are three reasons. One is that we are going to focus on the security business; we already produce a number of security products and we needed a secure site. We had the option of building up from scratch or getting into an already secure facility, and the IBM site was perfect for that. Second, we need highly qualified people. We want to minimize training and be up and running rapidly. The Burlington area has a good pool of labor with people who are knowledgeable in high tech. Third, we got a good deal from the state of Vermont. We have worked closely with the Vermont Department of Economic Development,
the Vermont Economic Progress Council and the Greater Burlington Industrial
Corporation to make this vision a reality. We have received Vermont Employment Growth Incentives and Vermont Training Program funds, which will be finalized soon. These were extremely important factors in making our decision.”

The RFID explosion, as most people know, didn’t happen as projected earlier in this decade. Growth in the field, however, is still anticipated, and printed electronics is viewed as the fuel for its propulsion.

“Most of the work in RFID is still compliance labeling,” says Richter. “Finding specialty applications is what everyone is searching for. Those could be the big opportunities. The joint venture allows us to stay in the technology.”