Complex global supply chains for mobile phones, computers, printers, automobiles, aircraft, defense systems, medical equipment and other important products are subject to risks and vulnerabilities that enable infiltration of counterfeit goods into legitimate trade channels. Counterfeiting of industrial and consumer products, and components incorporated into these products, can compromise the integrity of final products, generate losses to legitimate businesses and expose consumers to fake, faulty or harmful products.
Existing, widely deployed anti-counterfeiting technologies are subject to various limitations. For example one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) bar codes, holograms, and other optically readable labels and tags themselves be counterfeited (i.e., copied). Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have raised privacy concerns and also incur a relatively high unit cost, which generally makes them uneconomical for use with high volume, low unit cost products such as active and passive electronic components.