Tire manufacture

Assume post-cure mounting unless you have agreed otherwise with us in writing. The tag Identium lists for tyres, the UTTR6, is a thin body specified for mounting inside the tyre; its datasheet carries no cure-cycle rating, so do not assume it will come through a press intact. Embedding a tag in a green tyre before vulcanisation is a different construction problem and has to be specified against your actual press, so send us the temperature, dwell time and pressure at the intended mounting point and we will tell you what is buildable rather than guess. Curing moulds and containers are a separate exercise again. A sealed ceramic on-metal tag such as the CR400 suits the mould as a tracked asset, but its operating window is -40 to +100 deg C, well below cure temperature, so the mounting point has to sit somewhere that stays inside that window.

Identium quotes against a written specification rather than publishing a rate, because most of this is built to a spec rather than picked off a shelf. On the consumable side cost moves with annual tag volume, with the tag construction (a thin tyre tag for the inner liner, a sealed ceramic tag for moulds and a metal-mount tag for steel stillages are three different products at three different prices), and with whether tags arrive already encoded and serialised to your numbering scheme. On the fixed side it is the number of read points and how many antennas each one needs, since a conveyor station, a dock-door portal and a yard handheld are costed separately, plus the integration effort against your MES or WMS. Send your annual tag volume, the stages you want to read and a plant layout, and you get a line-by-line quote instead of a ballpark.

For the frequency itself, no individual user licence. India's RFID allocation is 865-868 MHz under the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules, and WPC has kept low-power use in that band exempt from licensing — that is the position as reported in 2026, and you should confirm the current WPC notification before freezing a tender clause, because the power limits and operating conditions are set there rather than by a supplier. The compliance burden falls mainly on the equipment, so what belongs in your specification is band-correct readers and antennas carrying WPC approval, and you should ask the supplier for that paperwork rather than take a datasheet's word for it. Identium's UHF readers and antennas are WPC-approved for India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band, and Identium is BIS certified. Watch for imported readers configured for 902-928 MHz, the US allocation: those are not approved for Indian deployment.

The protocol travels; the antenna tuning does not always. Tyre tagging uses passive UHF running EPC Gen2, formally ISO/IEC 18000-63 and marketed as RAIN RFID, and that is the same air interface a reader speaks anywhere in the world, so a compliant reader overseas should interrogate your tag. What differs is the band it transmits on: 865-868 MHz in India, 902-928 MHz in the United States, other allocations elsewhere. Tag antennas are tuned, so a tag optimised for the Indian band typically reads at a shorter distance on a US reader than it does at home, and how much shorter depends on the tag, the reader settings and the rubber and steel around it. Tell us the destination markets at enquiry stage so the tuning is decided once. And agree the EPC numbering format with your customer before anything is encoded, which catches out more programmes than the radio does.

Yes, and back-tagging finished stock needs no change to the production line: the inner liner is cleaned and the tag applied by adhesive or epoxy, which is slower per tyre than tagging in line but disturbs nothing upstream. The discipline that matters is uniqueness, because every tyre must carry exactly one identity and a repeated EPC is very hard to unpick once the tyres have shipped. Decide before you start whether Identium supplies tags pre-encoded inside a reserved serial range, or whether your team writes the EPC at the point of application using a handheld or a desktop UHF reader, and keep a register of which ranges have been issued to which shift or plant. Custom tags are typically a five to ten day turnaround from our Delhi factory and are tested in-house before dispatch, so allocate the serial blocks while the order is still in production.