Circus ILT-M: A winning combination for the gaming industry

Smartrac’s small HF inlay with NXP’s ICODE ILT-M IC solves common operational problems in close stacking applications for casino operators.

Smartrac’s Circus inlays and tags featuring NXP’s ICODE ILT-M IC are ideal for close stacking applications in fast-moving environments. Designed to suit applications where small size and high performance are a must, Circus inlays and tags allow close vicinity or contact stacking that typically won’t work with other inductively coupled HF and LF tags.

One interesting use case is the world of casino gaming. The casino industry has embraced these Circus ICODE ILT-M products, since the tags also work well in applications where very fast inventory management of multiple tags in the field is required, e.g. counting and authenticating casino chips. In such cases, Circus tags offer fast identification speed approaching the UHF EPC Class 1 Gen 2 standard, allowing hundreds of tags per second to be read.

This very high-speed identification rate means that tags equipped with the ILT-M IC are ideally suited to bulk counting of small items like casino chips. Such read efficiency can ease inventory management in casino chip banks, and allows casinos to automatically detect the monetary value of the gaming chips in front of each player, enabling monitoring of games and easy calculation of the total value of individual chip stacks. Such functionality may well in future enable a great deal of automation. As a secondary benefit, the tags can also be used to enable gaming chip authentication to prevent counterfeiting and theft, since casinos can devalue stolen chips in seconds, rendering them valueless to the thief.

Furthermore, Smartrac’s product offering featuring the ILT-M IC includes Circus, Block and Band inlays. They have been designed to provide also a full range of solutions for item-level tagging in healthcare, document management and related applications. In particular, Smartrac’s Band inlays have a slim antenna design to fit within the margin of documents so as not to interfere with document contents. The tags provide excellent performance in document identification where close stacking occurs, and work well in RFID applications where very fast inventory management of multiple RFID tags in the field is required. Band tags are equally well suited to document ownership and authentication applications.

Smartrac’s inlays and tags are compliant with ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management and ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management. This ensures a reliable and state-of-the-art product that meets a variety of application needs, where high performance is a critical parameter.