Inside Contactless, Aix en Provence, France, has supplied 10m PicoTag smart labels and microchips to the Ministry of Education, China, to be applied to students' identification cards.

The company worked through the Beijing Global Card Technology Center, its partner in China, to deliver the smart labels, which are produced from paper and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and backed with a pressure sensitive adhesive.

As well as using cryptographic algorithms, the tag also has a tamper proof design, causing the antenna or connection to the chip to be destroyed if the smart label is removed from the card. The chip is ISO 15693 compliant, can hold up to 2KB of data and operates at 13.56mHz.