On the Future of RFID

The Institute for The Future has a piece on 'RFID gets smaller and edible... and bigger' which takes a look at the world's smallest and thinnest RFID tags that have been introduced by Hitachi, measuring just 0.05 x 0.05 millimeters. The new "powder type" chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38 digit number and could be worked into any product:

A little over a year ago the Institute published a set of reports on the future of RFID. One of the things we argued was that in the future, RFID tags would be seen by consumers as just one of a kind Great Chain of (Digital) Being, part of a much bigger spectrum of information technologies that lived in or connected to the physical world. In addition to passive and active RFID tags, we'd have extremely small, disposable RFID tags; tags that had enough processing power and memory to almost be very small computers; RFID tags that were tailored to different functions and industries (e.g., security, asset management, object provenance and history and everything in between.

The post also makes mention of a patent filing by Kodak for an edible-- and more important, digestible-- RFID tag...