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2 - RFID technology and its applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2009

By
Sanjay Sarma
Edited by
Stephen B. Miles ,
Sanjay E. Sarma  and
John R. Williams
Stephen B. Miles
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sanjay E. Sarma
Affiliation:
MIT Auto-ID Labs
John R. Williams
Affiliation:
MIT Auto-ID Labs
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Summary

While the origins of RFID lie more than 50 years in the past, passive RFID technology is actually only in its infancy. This might seem an odd statement given that other technologies which have had a comparable history – computers for example – are considered mature. What makes RFID different?

The reason is that RFID, perhaps more than other technologies, is a systems technology that transcends the reader and the tag. Readers and tags are rarely, if ever, used alone. They are components of much larger systems, some of which they augment, and many of which they fundamentally enable. There are many other components to the system in which RFID participates, and, for RFID to really blossom, every component of the system must blossom. So every new advance in, say, battery technology or networking will launch a new wave of creativity and invention in RFID. This will create new applications. These new applications will increase the demand for products, further subsidizing research, and thus laying the seeds for the next invention and the next wave. It is my firm belief that RFID is currently only in its first wave.

EPC technology, developed first by the Auto-ID Center and then by EPCglobal, probably represents the state-of-the-art of the first wave of RFID. Today, EPC tags are being deployed worldwide in thousands of sites and billions of EPC tags have been read. Passive EPC tags are being used for intra- and inter-company applications on a scale perhaps never seen before.

Type
Chapter
Information
RFID Technology and Applications , pp. 16 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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