[photopress:logistics_rfid_tag.jpg,full,alignright]Each year an RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) Buyers Guide in China is published with a comprehensive listing of RFID products and their vendors.
As in over thousands of manufacturers and distributors of RFID label, hardware and software, as well as system integrators, institutions and research groups. 300 pages just to tell you about some little tags and how they can be read.
With a circulation of 10,000 books and 20,000 CDs, the book will be distributed for free to RFID industry in China, as well as retail, manufacturing, military, logistics and other place where RFID has great potential to reform the way people do business.
This is all more important than it sounds for we are in a state of flux. First an RFID tag is an object that can be applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radiowaves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.
You can see how this might be most useful in, say, stock taking in a department store or checking out the contents of a container. And you might also see how it could be misapplied by naughty persons seeking knowledge they should not have.
An RFID tags contain at least two parts — one is an integrated circuit for storing and nprocessing information, modulating and demodulating a (RF) signal, and other specialized functions while the second is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal.
All of which can be very small, minute. A technology called chipless RFID allows tags to be printed directly onto assets at a lower cost than traditional tags.
What is the problem? Mainly it is used by supply chain management, improving the efficiency of inventory tracking and management. And it is getting so huge, so massive it will in the fairly near term not be sustainable without linking the indoor tracking to the overall end-to-end supply chain visibility.
Analysts like Andrew Seybold — who is not stupid — believe that a single platform linking RFID to outdoor GPS tracking and cellular systems is required for a complete solution.
We then get to who is going to pay for this and immediately problems loom. It will all be solved but the potential RFID problem directly affects almost all Chinese manufacturers.
Source: PR-USA.net and research.