December 14, 2017
Your products leave your factories or warehouses in perfect condition. The question is, are they reaching your customers in their original, untouched state? Smartrac’s new Circus Tamper Loop tags provide the answer – and much more.
Countless high-value products are prone to tampering or counterfeiting – whether it’s vintage wines, highly effective pharmaceuticals, top-grade cosmetics, high-performance brake pads or Beluga caviar.
RFID technology has long provided effective countermeasures through track-and-trace or authentication solutions. Confirming its reputation as the RFID pacesetter, Smartrac is now introducing tamper detection and authentication at the tap of a smartphone.
The company’s new Circus Tamper Loop tags have been specifically designed for these tasks, targeting a wide array of applications in packaged goods for consumer and industrial markets. On top of that, the innovative tags open the door to entirely new, NFC-based customer experience solutions, featuring higher security and additional customer engagement at and beyond the point of sale.
Familiar Circus benefits enriched with a ‘Digital Seal’
Circus Tamper Loop is based on the well-established Circus product family. While retaining Circus’ basic small form factor, it comes with a tamper-loop extension to the established antenna design. This loop enables advanced ‘digital seal’ functionality for smart packaging and brand protection. The design of the loop can be customized to suit individual customer requirements, and can be adapted to fit a wide variety of packaging formats — from boxes to blister packs to bottles.
After tapping with your smartphone on the tag you immediately get the information if the seal on the package got broken.
The loop exhibits one of two visible conditions: a closed loop shows that the packaging is sealed, while an open loop indicates an open package. When the customer opens the sealed package the antenna gets physically broken. The tamper detection status can be checked at the tap of a smartphone via a programmed on-chip URL or via an app. This digital seal functionality shows whether the product has been tampered with, above and beyond the evidence of any visual inspection. This offers higher security and improved counterfeiting protection.
A perfect companion for enhanced customer experience
Moreover, products can be authenticated at any stage in the supply chain by verifying their digital identity. Even in the case of an open loop, the Circus Tamper Loop can be read with a smartphone to display a customer experience specific to an opened package. At any time, it can be exploited for further pre- and post-sales activities like vouchers, product services or access to dedicated social media channels, and much more.
Circus Tamper Loop is available with NXP’s NTAG 213 TT chip. The new variant of the proven NTAG 213 IC offers tamper detection with once-opened status, plus NXP original signature with an option of a brand-unique signature. It offers 144 bytes of user memory, and comes with unique ID (UID) mirror functionality. This enables the chip serial number to be mirrored as part of its encoded URL address. The feature includes an NFC tap counter, which allows every tag tapped to be seen and read as unique from an application perspective, without encoding serial numbers. Circus Tamper Loop is available in wet and paper-tag delivery formats.
For further information about our Circus Tamper Loop, please contact our sales & customer service team
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