Tiny radio chip can stores video clips

location based services

A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard's research labs in the UK.
The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband.
Details of the chip were revealed at an event held in London on Monday. A Memory Spot can be read by a specialised device or an appropriately modified cellphone or PDA. It does not require a battery as it draws power from the reading device's radio field.
Existing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can store up to a few kilobytes of data and transmit this wirelessly over a range of a few metres. They are often used to add information to a product for tracking or identification purposes.
Reading speed
Hewlett-Packard's new chip provides much more memory – between 32 and 500 kilobytes – and can be read at about 10 megabits per second, fast enough to download everything from a 500 kilobyte chip in one-third of a second and about 10 times faster than a typical RFID chip.
"A Memory Spot uses similar principles to RFID but significantly extends them in terms of reading speed and memory capacity," says Huw Robson, director of media technologies at Hewlett-Packard's labs in Bristol, UK. "We can move up to higher memory densities."
In addition, unlike RFID tags, the new chips can be made rewritable and perform simple processing tasks for themselves, such as data encryption. However, instead of beaming the data out over several metres, a Memory Spot can only be read from a distance of 1.5 millimetres or less. The term for this is "near field communications".
Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document.
Major players
"Memory spot technology is a very interesting development," says Heikke Huomo, technical director of Innovision Research and Technology in Cirencester, UK, a firm that makes custom microchips.
Hewlett-Packard hopes to persuade cellphone and PDA makers to enable their products to read the chips. "We have started discussions with the major players," Robson says. "We need the reader to be built into a ubiquitous application, something the user carries all the time, like a phone."
In Japan, cellphone company NTT DoCoMo already makes devices that can wirelessly make payments, using a near field communications chip developed by Sony, called Felica. "It makes sense to make a small corner of a phone's main processor handle near field communications applications," Huomo says. "Setting up a connection is simple and automatic."