A group of technology suppliers, standards bodies and associations, and potential users from a wide variety of industries has formed the Smart Active Label Consortium. Its aim is “to promote smart active label solutions and create standards to benefit supply chain management, asset tracking and the daily lives of consumers in a wide range of industries”.

“Smart active labels will lead the way for the RFID industry to become bigger than the plastics credit card and smart card industry,” says Baruch Levanon, interim chairman of the consortium. “For me, SAL isn’t just RFID labels – it includes printed microelectronics, roll-to-roll mass production of environment friendly, disposable devices.”

He says the SAL Consortium plans to develop several active and semi active modular tag demonstrations, create uniform standards, and publish technical papers and economic analyses of SAL systems under its umbrella. Following the development of demonstration systems, the consortium will run a series of end user showcases in Europe and the USA throughout 2003.

More information from SAL Consortium – WEBSITE: www.sal-c.org/index