DELO, Mühlbauer, Impinj Achieve Milestone in Efficient RAIN RFID Label Manufacturing

DELO Industrial Adhesives, Mühlbauer and Impinj, Inc. have announced a new milestone in the effort to achieve high-volume inlay manufacturing. The three RAIN RFID industry leaders have successfully teamed to deliver DELO MONOPOX AC6545, supporting the high-speed assembly of copper-bonded RFID chips such as the Impinj Monza 6 family on Mühlbauer high speed assembly lines.
 
The new adhesive is a step forward on the “Path to 100k UPH”, manufacturing 100,000 RAIN RFID labels per hour on a single assembly line. Achieving this goal will empower inlay manufacturers to increase throughput and reduce operating costs, allowing RAIN RFID tagging to scale across high-volume industries such as apparel, retail, shipping, and airline baggage tracking.
 
Featuring an excellent adhesion to copper, DELO MONOPOX AC6545 enables the high-speed assembly of copper-plated chips such as the Impinj Monza 6 family. The solvent-free, anisotropic conductive adhesive (ACA) can be applied by jetting technologies and also delivers improved performance with gold-bonded chips.
 
In addition to rapid dispensing, extremely quick curing is essential to support the fastest assembly speeds. This product allows for curing times as low as one second when using a thermode at 230 °C, making it one of the fastest products in DELO’s portfolio of RAIN RFID adhesives. With higher temperatures, even shorter curing times can be achieved.
 
With these improved ACA curing times, Mühlbauer’s DDA (Direct Die Attach) can now produce over 40k UPH. For more than three years, customers have operated DDA machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Going forward, the Mühlbauer roadmap includes increasing machine capacity to 100k UPH and full automation over the complete inlay production chain to improve the yield and reliability of the final assembly.
 
“The fact that our adhesives are in 80 percent of the billions of RAIN RFID labels produced annually is a result of our high commitment to advancing the industry,” said Karl Bitzer, head of product management of DELO.
 
“We shared our Concept 2020 with the RAIN RFID community in 2014, and today we have realized a big step to reach this future vision for extremely cost-sensitive, ultra-high volume applications,” said Gerald Niklas, business development at Mühlbauer.
 
“Our close partnership with DELO and Mühlbauer has enabled this significant improvement in Monza IC inlay-manufacturing speeds with world-class quality,” said Carl Brasek, VP of silicon product management at Impinj.