Thermal rewritable technology has been around for nearly a decade but market acceptance has been much slower than anticipated in the US. The rewritable usages are often seen in Japan and Europe for such applications as loyalty/points cards, hotel guest door key cards, train system pre-paid passes and ski passes.There is a new application being promoted in Japan which combines RFID and thermal rewritable technologies. One of the major obstacles in RFID today is the cost of media - if the media can be reused, the per-usage cost can go down. The electronic data on the memory chip can be updated very easily while visual data such as alpha-numeric and bar code information update is difficult once it is printed with conventional printing technology. This is where rewritable technology comes in. A new application is for the RFID label with thermal rewritable capability.One of key components in thermal rewritable technology is the eraser. The presentation is about the newly developed 6-inch version thermal erase head in order to accommodate the new application's requirements. Erase head can be heated on demand, while other traditional erasing devices such as heat rollers have to be kept hot always.