SBIR-STTR Award

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to create an active supply chain through serialization of nearly every product for better data and efficiency. Each year corporations lose over $818 B because of inadequate inventory systems. This affects the entire supply chain and reduces the potential for faster distribution of better products. Manufacturers, shippers and consumers need to track their products from manufacturing, logistics, retail and even the home using a singular tag. The savings from accurately tracking and identifying inventory will be billions of dollars per year and will significantly reduce waste. The opportunities for data collection for individuals and companies throughout the lifecycle of the product will also potentially spur new industries and disrupt older industries. The proposed project brings together several different innovations into an inventory tracking and identification system, including antennas, thin film detection and polarized dielectrics. The project involves both computational and laboratory experiments that will design and validate the technology, including the development of software tools to assist distinguishing the tags in real-life environments. The problems to be studied are reading data from ambient network (4G, 5G, or even Wi-Fi) signals via chip-less tags, omni-directional detection, and printing directly onto non-conductive material. The project will iteratively and effectively tackle these problems through advanced R&D focusing on antenna design, thin-film manufacturing, and signal-processing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project improves inventory management. An estimated $818 billion is lost annually due to incomplete knowledge of a company’s inventory. The problem occurs because of the absence of a label at manufacturing that survives through the supply chain (retail, logistics, and end user). Currently, traditional supply chain management forces a company to add at least one new tag at each step. This project will reduce the number of tags per product, exponentially decrease waste, increase supply chain efficiency, and prevent knockoffs or counterfeits from being added to the supply chain. All of this will help businesses run more effectively, better serve customers, and enable consumers to gain detailed knowledge of their purchases.The intellectual merit of this project is development of the first commercially viable, cradle-to-grave inventory tag through optimization and scalability tasks. The innovation is a chipless inventory tag with a unique serial number for every product to provide the cradle-to-grave functionality. The underlying Material Adjusted Signature Tag (MAST) technology uses printable materials to create a unique radio frequency (RF) signal. The MAST tags will enable direct printing or application of a tag onto a product, allowing an efficient way to reliably identify, track, and attribute data to a product throughout its life. This project will improve the tag’s data potential, optimize manufacturability, and achieve greater readability. Beyond optimization and scalability milestones, this project will test the tags, readers, and manufacturing equipment in relevant environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.