Passive RFID

This year, for the first time, China has become the world's largest market for RFID by value. A new report

With about $5 billion being spent on RFID in 2007, of which about $2.24 billion is for tags, what are the favourite RFID specifications?

In the last few weeks alone, orders for well over US$100 million of contactless (ie RFID) smart cards and associated systems have been placed. The business is surging forward with the percentage of smart cards that are contactless rising to 16% of deliveries in 2007 after having been stuck at around 5% for the preceding twenty years. Learn more.

In 2007, approximately 650 billion articles will be sent through postal and courier systems around the world. After retail, the tagging of each postal item is the next largest potential market for RFID by volume of tags. There are numerous significant RFID roll-outs in this sector which are under publicized, and here Raghu Das from IDTechEx summarises the latest progress.

As we enter 2007, many RFID suppliers are licking their wounds, while for others, RFID business is booming. As IDTechEx interview solution providers and users across the RFID industry for the new report RFID Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2007-2017 to be released in January, Raghu Das, CEO, summarizes some of the findings.

With the launch of an RFID Investment Summit to be held in Boston on Feb 20, Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx looks at the recent investor interest in RFID and particularly active RFID and Real Time Locating Systems.

RFID technology is moving on apace in some areas. Certainly EPC Gen2 tags have demonstrated spectacular performance improvements when tagging cases and pallets. However work is still needed.

An analysis of 75 case studies from 18 countries of Active RFID in action shows the hot sectors in this technology vertical.

Definitions of RFID frequencies

Item level tagging is going to be the biggest market for RFID. However, despite many companies wanting everything at one frequency - UHF - the limitations of far field UHF systems with water and metal have hindered this. Recently there have been big developments in near field UHF, with companies citing performance similar to that of HF tags. IDTechEx provides an independent analysis.