The State of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): Trends in the RFID Industry

This tutorial discusses the trends in the RFID industry, and it is the fifth part of a six-part tutorial series. The tutorial series is based on the transcription of a presentation by Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor of RFID Journal, during the RF Summit at NIWeek 2005. The presentation is broken into six RFID topics, including successful real-world applications, industry trends, and areas of improvement. To see the complete list of topics, view the RFID Tutorial Main Page.

Part 5: Trends in the RFID Industry

Right now this RFID industry is doing phenomenally well. When I first came into this industry, it was completely stagnant, and I used to spend half my day trying to find a new story to write about. In the early days, we actually wrote about biometrics because we wanted to have something fresh on the Web site and it was kind of close to RFID, but now it’s an explosion. If you put “RFID” in Google or you do Google news, the amount of stuff that comes up is amazing—there’s tremendous innovation underway. Companies are investing in new products [and] new technologies that support this. There is investment capital pouring into small start-ups, and more and more companies are starting to realize that RFID goes beyond just the ability to track goods in the supply chain.

It’s got lots of other benefits [such as] cell phones merging with the wireless networks. One of the applications that Nokia has come up with is an RFID reader in a phone. It’s a little phone, and it’s got a little 13.56 MHz reader. What they do is if you’re a maintenance guy and, lets say, you’re in the [Department of Defense] and you're trying to confirm that all the doors are locked in a facility that’s about 200,000 square feet. You would just go and scan all these things and the cell phone would go off and report, “This door’s locked.” Potentially the same application can be used by consumers. You go into the store, and you scan some goods. You can download some specs on that and get some more information beyond what’s on the product and what’s available right there, or maybe you scan the goods and you go onto epinions.com and you find out what other consumers think about it.

There are also lots of bad sides to what’s happening in RFID. We have lots of people who want to cover this now because they think it’s an important trend, and so they just want to write about it to write about it. Most of them know very little about it, and, I have to say, on the surface RFID looks very simple, but I’ve been writing about it for three and a half—actually more than that, four and a half years. I still learn stuff everyday. It’s very complicated technology—lots of nuances lots of differences. You can tell when you read a story and somebody doesn’t know the difference between 915 and 13.56 [MHz] because they behave in totally different ways, and if you don’t know that, it’s pretty apparent.

We’ve got vendors jumping in saying, “Yeah, we got RFID product.” I don’t know if you remember during the Internet boom, everybody said, “Oh yeah, we got this Internet thing; we got this market place,” and it was just basically a press release. We’re seeing a lot of that because if you’re a big company and you’ve got no RFID strategy, you don’t necessarily want everybody to know that, so you say you’ve got something even when you don’t. We’re seeing hype and anti-hype. I’ll read a story or a headline that says, “RFID is going to put the barcode out of business,” and in the same day there will be a headline, “RFID: the most over-hyped technology ever.” So there’s lots of confusion. People are wrong on both ends of that. The poor end users are struggling, trying to figure out whether this is the next great revolution or the next great waste of time.

So these are the things the end users are struggling with right there. They're trying to figure out, “How: How do I justify the cost of the tags if I’m paying $0.50 for an RFID label today as opposed to a transponder that I can stick in the package.” That might be the the profit margin on a case of Pantene shampoo. So they are struggling with that right now. [End users are struggling with] the reliability of tags, UHF tags. We’re seeing failure rates on these tags of 2 to 19%. So you buy 1,000 tags, and 19% of them could be non-functioning when you get them. We’re [also] seeing a problem with the supply of tags. So manufacturers are having trouble cranking these things out. The problem, basically, you’ve got to get a microchip with a very tiny pad, and you’ve got to attach an antenna in such a way that it functions not on a substrate and integrate it with a label. Then when the label comes out of the label printer it still has to function.

This concludes the fifth part of a six-part tutorial series. To see the complete list of topics, view the RFID Tutorial Main Page.

Solution for Testing RFID Readers (Interrogators) and Tags

VI Services Network, a NI Alliance Member, currently offers a complete test system for testing RFID readers and tags.
The test system is based on the following NI products:

• Vector Signal Generator
• RF Signal Analyzer
• PXI Chassis and Controllers
• LabVIEW Graphical Programming Environment

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reader Comments | Submit a comment »