BAE develop paint w/radio chips: DoD Interested

This article is from a BAE Systems company newsletter.

Tuning into the sound of paint.

Paint containing tiny radio chips powered by the atmosphere's electromagnetic energy that could be used to transmit information on everything from how well medical devices are working within patients to whether ice cream us being stored at the correct temperature is one of the latest remarkable inventions by BAE Systems scientists.

Dr Karl Brommer leads the micro-radio team at Electronics Intelligence & Support in the U.S. that developed the so-called radio paint, and he said the applications for the technology were limited only by people's imagination.

Because tiny radios would need no batteries - drawing their power from the environment - they could theoretically broadcast indefinitely.

The micro-radio team has filed a patent and a trademark for the radio paint concept, signifying the broadest possible scope for the technology.

Karl, who has worked for BAE systems for more than 20 years, said: "It is exciting that our company has a big inventory of innovative radio designs."

He said he was genuinely amazed at the intelligence and the innovation of his fellow team members, who he called some of the "smartest people he has ever been around."

"What we've been doing is resurrecting radio circuit designs from the 1930s and making them again with new high-tech materials," he said.

So far, the team has won a dozen contracts and is providing products for a number of clients.

Karl holds a number of advisory positions with prominent research universities. At one of these, the center for Nanoscale-Chemical-Electrical Mechanical manufacturing Systems at the University of Illinois, he works with nanotechnology leader professor John Rogers. "John reduces these radios down to nearly a molecular level, to a point where we can theoretically put them in ink in an ink-jet type printer."

Karl is showing the radio paint idea to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and he said people at the DoD were "getting excited" by the possibilities.

However, he said the civilian applications might prove even more significant, where the radio's tiny size and limitless power source offered potential for long term monitoring of products and servicing.