|
USA : RFID - a long way to go!
16th September, 2004
|
 |
The acronymn, a buzzword of today's business information world stands for Radio Frequency Identification technology.
But surprizingly, its been around for decades, now and yet, not got off the ground, literally speaking.
Says Dr Rajit Gadh, Professor of Engineering at UCLA, during a visit to the university's Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC).
"People say 'Gen one, gen two,' but we're really in the first iteration of RFID technology," he says.
Wal-Mart, DoD, and Target suppliers, were among many others who joined the bandwagon turning RFID compliant declaring a mandate on the issue. But Gadh has plenty of empirical evidence to back it up as he heads up the WINMEC project.
Gadh's lab sets about getting every type of RFID tag available and testing it against different reader combinations (with the middleware provided by WINMEC itself).
"In every batch of 100 tags, a few will not work," he says. While not able to give a precise estimate because of the huge volume of tags that WINMEC receives and tests, Gadh characterizes tag reliability as a lot worse than the reliability of even consumer electronics. "There's clearly a lot of work needed in this field," he notes.
That's not to minimize some of the strides that have been in balky RFID environments. "Intermec has tags that you can put on metallic surfaces and scan," says Gadh, by way of example. Still, most of the work lies ahead and across many different functional areas.
"You'll have to redesign packaging, how shipping is done, readers, tags, software," he says, emphasizing the need to move beyond the generic approach. "Slap-and-ship on a can of Coke isn't going to work."
Two sets of limitations include one that has to do with physics (for example, getting a signal to pass through a steel wall), but the other is more manageable.
Gadh offers an example. "You could have antennas on different axes of a soda bottle to create more redundancy, more possibility of capturing a signal," he says. "When you design the antenna, you can have focused efforts to address individual problems, and this can get you around some of the technological issues."
That is not going to happen without lots and lots of testing, much of which is being undertaken by Wal-Mart suppliers. However, WINMEC is also going to offer testing in the months ahead. For a fee, companies will be able to run small RFID pilots in the lab using any combination of tag and reader technology. WINMEC will offer more details on October 12th, when it is hosting an RFID conference on the UCLA campus.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Create your
Business Homepage |
| 1. Select area of
Business |
| 2. Add your profile |
| 3. Add your Domain area |
| 4. Add details for Directory |
| 5. Finally select the domain
name |
| Create your free webpage |
|