New Label Changes Displayed Price Data With Power from RFID

Powercast’s new Batteryless Electronic UHF Retail Price Tag receives pricing information from an RFID interrogator, while also harvesting the RF energy, then uses that energy to change the price accordingly on its display.

The “power-over-distance” wireless charging price tag has a built-in UHF RFIDtransponder and an e-ink screen, as well as Powercast’s PCC110 Powerharvester chip. When interrogated, the label can not only follow a command sent by that interrogator—such as changing pricing information—but it also uses RF-to-DC power harvesting to enable those actions, says Charles Greene, Powercast’s COO and CTO.

With Powercast’s battery-less price label, a store associate requires only a handheld readerthat stores pricing data or can access that information via a Wi-Fi connection. Stores could configure the software in a multitude of ways, such as linking each unique ID number on a label with a specific product, so that the new prices could be linked to that ID during interrogation. Conversely, stores could link changes to a zone of products—for instance, a handheld reader could access prices for a particular department (housewares, for example) by reading a tag ID dedicated to that zone. Scanning bar codes would be another alternative to link a specific zone or stock-keeping unit (SKU) to specific price changes, Greene says.