A radio chip the size of a grain of rice has been developed at Hewlett Packard (HP)’s research labs in Britain.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects.

A Memory Spot can be read by a specialized device, an appropriately modified cell-phone or a personal digital assistant (PDA).

It does not require a battery as it draws power from the reading device’s radio field.

In comparison with existing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that can store up to a few kilobytes of data and transmit this wirelessly over a range of a few meters, the new chip provides much more memory — between 32 and 500 kilobytes. The chip can be read at about 10 megabits per second, fast enough to download everything from a 500 kilobyte model in one-third of a second and around 10 times faster than a typical RFID chip.

Huw Robson, director of media technologies at Hewlett-Packard’s labs in Bristol, Britain explained: ’A Memory Spot uses similar principles to RFID but significantly extends them in terms of reading speed and memory capacity.’

Unlike RFID tags, the new chips can be made rewritable and perform simple processing tasks for themselves, such as data encryption. However, instead of beaming the data out over several meters, a Memory Spot can only be read from a distance of 1.5 millimeters or less. The term for this is ’near field communications’.

Hewlett-Packard hopes to persuade cell-phone and PDA makers to enable their products to read the chips and has started discussions with some major players in the field.