One of the primary drivers of the increasing adoption of RFID technology is the declining cost of RFID tags. Alien Technology has been instrumental in not only dramatically reducing the cost of UHF RFID tags, but also in ensuring their economical production in quantities of billions .

Alien has developed and holds exclusive patent and intellectual property rights to a revolutionary manufacturing assembly technology called Fluidic Self Assembly (FSA®). Invented at University of California, Berkeley by Prof. John S. Smith, FSA enables efficient placement of very large numbers of small components across a surface in a single operation. FSA has numerous potential uses, including the high-volume manufacture of very inexpensive RFID tags.

The FSA process allows Alien to package tiny integrated circuits (NanoBlock® ICs) for assembly into RFID tags at rates upwards of 2,000,000 per hour. This contrasts with the approximately 10,000 per hour possible with conventional methods that were developed to handle much larger and more costly integrated circuits.

As a result of FSA, Alien is currently able to offer low cost RFID tags . This is expected to decrease further as demand continues to ramp and as higher volume production facilities come on line.