AUTOMOTIVES


RFID inside tires: Engineering identification


for the mobility ecosystem


By Randall Grein, director Of business development at HANA RFID


F


ew electronic systems operate in an environment as hostile as the inside of a tire. During manufacturing, tires undergo vulcanisation at temperatures exceeding 170 °C under high pressure. Once in operation, they experience continuous deformation, centrifugal forces, moisture, debris and electromagnetic interference from steel reinforcement layers embedded within the rubber structure. Electronics designed for this environment must survive manufacturing and remain functional throughout the tire’s entire lifecycle.


Over the past two decades, RFID technology has proven capable of doing exactly that. What began as an experimental identification concept has evolved into a robust embedded technology platform deployed at industrial


28 JUNE 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS


scale across the global tire industry. Today, close to 300 million RFID tire tags have been deployed worldwide by Hana RFID, demonstrating that embedded identification is no longer experimental but an increasingly important part of tire manufacturing and lifecycle traceability. The company’s tire tagging program builds on more than twenty years of engineering work focused specifically on RFID systems designed for extreme environments.


Engineering electronics inside a moving structure


Embedding electronics in tires presents challenges that go far beyond conventional RFID label design. Unlike static surfaces such as packaging or logistics pallets, a tire is a


continuously moving mechanical structure. As it rotates, the tire repeatedly flexes and relaxes, generating cyclic deformation that can damage rigid electronic components. Steel belts inside the tire further complicate RF communication by attenuating radio signals and altering electromagnetic propagation. At the same time, rubber behaves as a high-dielectric material, detuning antenna structures that would normally perform well in free space. For engineers designing RFID systems for tires, the antenna therefore becomes a hybrid mechanical and electromagnetic component. It must maintain RF performance while surviving millions of mechanical stress cycles.


To address this challenge, Hana RFID worked


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50