The shipping and logistics industry has been using active RFID and GPS based technologies for many years tracking trucks, trailers, rail cars, and shipping containers around the globe.
While there are many applications that require the enhanced capabilities of these technologies, recent advancements in durable on-metal UHF passive RFID tags work sufficiently well to support many of the same applications at a much lower cost. Furthermore, the EPC Gen2 UHF RFID standard is a truly global standard providing total interoperability by an ever increasing collection of tag and reader manufacturers.
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The use of passive UHF RFID tags in the Aerospace and Defense market goes back to 2003.At that time the global standards had evolved to a point where organizations such as McCarran airport in Las Vegas and Hong Kong airport moved forward with plans to use first generation EPC RFID tags for tracking baggage at those respective airports.
The majority of the RFID tag products we provide are sold through our network of Solution Provider Partners. In most cases we can find off the shelf products that address their needs. For more challenging applications we work together with our partners to develop tagging solutions that support their unique requirements.
Going above and beyond to support customer success is an integral part of our business. It's what we do...and our customers (and their customers) appreciate that very much.
Tracking hazardous materials and maintaining critical equipment is increasingly important to provide for public good while supporting public safety and homeland security initiatives. The petrochemical industry has been leveraging technologies provided by trucking and rail carriers. Where these have provided great visibility of large containers they do not provide visibility of individual items such as gas cylinders and specialty chemical containers.
In the petroleum industry equipment inspection and visibility of critical parts enable the industry to address the global requirements for efficient distribution of petroleum products. Passive RFID tags provide valuable tools for maintaining inspection records and tracking equipment in this vitally important industry.
Improved visibility of high value IT assets has long been a goal of the information technology industry. In the past, equipment and data were locked up in the enterprise IT environments. With the advent of the internet, intranets, laptops, hand-held computers and phones, and portable storage media, high value equipment, and higher value data, are increasingly mobile. Current methods for tracking these high value assets are primarily manual and error prone. Organization have tried bar code based solutions to attempt to address this problem, but the “line-of-site” requirement of barcode and the placement and durability of the labels often make these implementations impractical.
The overwhelming majority of requests we get are for tags that must work for the most demanding applications. We are constantly putting tags to the test to make sure we can rapidly meet the needs of our customers. We recently ran a battery of tests to test the durability of tags in high temperature environments including autoclaves. The results are in...and they are not all in line with vendor claims.
The EPC Gen2 passive UHF RFID standard adopted in 2004 required that RFID tags/silicon must provide a minimum of 96 bit of data to support the EPC numbering scheme. For supply chain applications 96 bits is all they need and I do not see this changing anytime soon. For asset management applications, where the overwhelming majority of our customers are deploying RFID, a unique identifier is all that is required.
Industrial manufacturers have long sought a solution to keeping track of specialty tools and high value inventory items. Manual systems have proven to be difficult to implement and unreliable. Barcode systems require the operator have direct line-of-site to the barcode, which is often impractical in manufacturing environments.
There are numerous organizations in the RFID industry that offer product testing and evaluation services. Many of these offer to sell the results of their evaluations for an often hefty fee. For individuals interested in the physics of how RFID works this information may have some value. For most though this information has little value since it a lab environment bears no resemblance of the actual environment in which your application will be deployed.
Our recommendation are as follows:
Standard EPC Gen2 RFID tags are made up of an integrated circuit (IC or chip) and a passive tag antenna (together called an inlay). Most often these are integrated into a label material. The key differentiating features of these tags are antenna design and storage capacity; the same label “packaging” can be used on any standard inlay. Often referred to as "Smart Labels", these are the tags most associated with supply chain applications such as those promoted by Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense.