MICRO-TECHNOLOGY
Radio tags for cells
The antenna of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag is so small that you can hold it with a pair of tweezers. But it’s still not small enough to insert into cells. | Photo: Florian Hartmann
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags can be used to track the route of parcels. A team at EPFL now wants to shrink these tags down to the micrometre level so that they can be inserted into cells for biomedical studies. They’ve already managed the leap down to a few millimetres with tags comprising a miniscule antenna. By incorporating a capacitor, these tags can transmit in the gigahertz range. This is ideal, because its frequencies are less affected by the signal loss caused by biological tissue.
