CYBERJAYA (Malaysia), Sept 4: Malaysia has bought the rights from a Japanese firm to the world’s smallest microchip that can be embedded in everything from currencies to human bodies and will boost the global anti-terror war, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Thursday.

Mahathir said the revolutionary miniature chip, developed by Japan’s FEC Inc., could be combined with current technology to “greatly prevent the possibilities of terrorist acts” as well as banknote and document counterfeiting.

“With the need for greater security at airports and other transport terminals the current security level provided by available systems is insufficient,” Mahathir said.

“The application is almost unlimited,” he told a news conference after annual talks with global hi-tech chiefs at this town in Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor MSC), an enclave south of the capital Kuala Lumpur modeled after California’s Silicon Valley.

“We think this is a great breakthrough for Malaysia. It is the first in the world. No other people have come up with such a tiny microchip, particularly as it also has a built-in antenna.”

The veteran premier declined to reveal the cost for the project, dubbed MM or Malaysian Microchip.

“I think it is reasonably priced,” he said, adding in jest that the acronym MM did not stand for Mahathir Mohamad.

Mahathir said the project, in which Malaysia would establish the chip applications and network, would spur new economic initatives and accelerate the country’s goal of becoming a developed nation by 2020.

Measuring 0.5 of a square milimeter and produced at less than 0.38 ringgit (10 cents) each, the chip — the size of a dot — uses the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip technoloy.

Mahathir said the chip would initially be manufactured in Japan early next year but production would eventually be shifted to a factory in Malaysia’s Kedah state —AFP