Smart tags that are exactly reliable enough

Smart tags for fast moving consumer goods are among the products predicted to be part of the Internet of Everything. The tags must be extremely low cost, be fabricated in huge volumes, and have a quality accepted by the end user. Screening tests have been performed to evaluate technologies for hybrid integration of smart tags. An anisotropic conductive adhesive (ACP) was compared with use of a low temperature solder and critical factors limiting the quality of each technology were identified. The motivation for the research was to avoid over-engineering of the quality of the joints where this would correlate with too high costs. For the system with an ACP, the matrix material was identified as the critical factor whereas for the soldered system, the quality of the backplane appeared more critical than the soldered joints themselves. Draft specifications that were considered in this work were not met for the system with ACP whereas they were easily met for all tested soldered systems.