INNOVATION AND iMPACT
The project PHOTAG is financied by Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) within the action" Missione 4 Istruzione e ricerca – Componente 2 “Dalla ricerca all’impresa” Investimento 1.1 Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)” del PNRR – Finanziato dall’Unione Europea – NextGenerationEU".
The analysis document n°5 of the Senate of Italian Republic (2017) “Lotta alla contraffazione e tutela del made in Italy '' underlines the “importance of introducing traceability systems and increasing controls on the production and distribution chain. …Through unclonable identification codes, optimized for the mobile system …, the consumer will be able to know the actual origin of the products and receive adequate information on quality, on the origin of components and raw materials as well as on the manufacturing process of goods and intermediate and finished products.”
This analysis was received by the Ministry of economic development that remarked on the fundamental relevance of adopting and strengthening anti-counterfeiting policies and instruments for the actuation of National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Indeed, the harm caused by intellectual property (IP) crime hits company profits, tax revenues and endangers public life. Both large and small companies need to maximize their protection against fakes by taking advantage of the numerous technical solutions to protect ownership rights and supply chains. All these economic and societal damages will be targeted by the Consiglio Nazionale per la Lotta alla Contraffazione e all’Italian Sounding (Cnalcis), settled in October 2021, which aims to promote and coordinate actions to protect the made in Italy.
In this scenario, the PHOTAG project responds to this urgent need of unclonable and smart labels that can protect commercial products against counterfeiting and pave the way for novel and scalable certificated trace-and-track photonic tags. We will develop two types of smart labels based on cost effective materials and realization/validation processes with a potential for large scale production. We envisage to achieve a technology readiness level (TRL) of 4 within the project duration.
The novel photonic tags could be used to track and trace the product path along its lifetime by realization and registration of the final tag in a multi-step process. Indeed, each sub-tag will be encoded only after its identification and validation at the trusted node of the supply chain. The final QR code - composed by an optical encoding of the goods history - will thus link to the metadata safely stored in a secure backend database. Future photonic tag implementations can also exploit blockchain architectures.
Though several engineering challenges are still ahead, we anticipate that the synergy in large-scale controlled synthesis of liquid crystalline based polymers, the variety choice of optical bar-codes, printing technologies, photonic devices, and smartphone decryption technologies will ultimately enable high-security-level anti-counterfeiting applications.
More in detail, we underline the impact of PHOTAG project in the scientific, technological, economic and sustainability field.
scIENTIFIC
The application-driven goal of the project is actually based on fundamental aspects of photonics and material science. Volume encryption and data storage in photo-writable (responsive) materials will allow the study and development of thin active metasurfaces that not only encodes complex metadata connected to a secure database or blockchain, but will ground future research on optical computing via meta holograms towards the appealing and challenging topic of machine learning in photonic polymeric hardware.
TECHNOLOGICAL
Optical memory data stripes are laser reading devices able to store data and images up to 4 MB. These are a read-only device without any possible update. Currently all optical memory stripe solutions on the market are patent protected. PHOTAG aims to overcome this technology level with a secure optical tag that can be updated for containing all the certified information of the trusted nodes of the supply chain. At the final step of the distribution chain, the consumer can optically image and read the resulting unique QR code, having access to the metadata stored in the image.
ECONOMIC
Globalization has brought new business opportunities, but it has also brought big threats to industry, exposing supply chains to fraudsters, attacks and disruption. As a result, the production and distribution of counterfeit goods have become an urgent and increasingly critical worldwide issue especially for e-commerce. According to a 2019 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the EUIPO on trends in illicit trade, within the past 3 years the value of counterfeit goods had reached USD 509 billion, equal to 3.3 % of global trade. The introduction of novel, highly secure but cost effective photonic tags aims therefore to limit and hopefully to eliminate the economic losses associated to counterfeiting.
SUSTAINABILITY
Cost effective and bio-compatible polymers will promote a technology that can be accessible for all products, from cheap to luxury goods. The passive nature of the optical memory of the proposed photonic tags does not require powering and can be updated and read multiple times by external systems. However to make their production and use sustainable, eco/biocompatible materials and the adoption of recycled material are envisaged. The great variety of eco/bio-compatible polymers as well as bio-cholesteric liquid crystals could enable the realization of green cholesteric photonic tags. Cholesteric liquid crystals are omnipresent in living matter (cholesteric organization of DNA, chromatin, chitin, cellulose, collagen, viruses, silk and cholesterol ester deposition in atherosclerosis) and they can be extracted from bio-materials.