Smartcode invests in India RFID centre

SmartCode Corp., a supplier of RFID hardware solutions, has announced the establishment of a RFID Centre in India, and the addition of 18 new partnerships in India. The company has made an investment of up to Rs.67.98 crore ($15 million).

The new RFID Centre will further expand SmartCode Corp's footprint in the India market and will include Research & Development, Sales & Marketing, and Distribution for the India market. The new RFID Centre in India will also cater to the neighbouring markets of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Burma. SmartCode Corp's RFID Centre will join SmartCode's long established presence in the Asian market including China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

"SmartCode Corp.'s 18 new partnerships in India further demonstrate our dominance in the Global RFID market and the strong demand we see for our low cost, high performance RFID solutions worldwide" said Avi Ofer, CEO & President, SmartCode Corp., "With the establishment of SmartCode's new RFID Centre in India, we are expanding our global presence to more than 100 countries worldwide."

The Indian market presents lucrative and diverse opportunities for products, services, and commitment. India's infrastructure, transportation, energy, environmental, health care, high-tech, and defence sector requirements for equipment and services will exceed tens of billions of dollars in the mid-term as the Indian economy globalises and expands. India's GDP, currently growing at around seven per cent, makes it one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Construction of nearly everything from airports to container ports to teleports is setting the stage to remake India. 

Source : EE Times India

TI unveils high-frequency RFID reader IC family

Using advanced design practices to increase reader efficiency while reducing the IC footprint, Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) has announced the availability of a high-frequency (13.56MHz), multi-standard RFID reader IC product family. The advanced package design of the TRF7960 family measures 5-by-5mm, and supports ISO/IEC 14443A/B, ISO/IEC 15693, ISO/IEC 18000-3 and TI's contactless commerce and Tag-It portfolio.

To maximise read range and reliability, said TI, the integrated on-board linear voltage regulators that turn up the analogue, digital and power amplifiers, provide power supply noise isolation. The reader has an integrated analogue front end and data framing system for all the supported standards, while the dual receiver input configuration of the TRF7960 reader family detects AM and PM. This feature helps to eliminate read 'holes' created when antenna orientation in the operating environment changes the tag return signal from AM to PM resulting in more consistent tag reads.

By providing an internal clock for the microcontroller, the TRF7960 powered reader uses only a single 13.56MHz crystal rather than the standard two crystals, reducing the total bill of materials of the end reader product. Designed with fewer components, TI's reader IC consumes less power, takes up less space, and can therefore address sensitivity and noise attenuation issues. Other integrated functions include error checking, data formatting, framing and anti-collision support for multi-reader environments. The TRF7960 is designed for both fixed and handheld reader devices.

Power consumption for the overall reader is reduced by providing seven flexible manual or automated configuration settings which shut down unused sections of the reader to save power. The TRF7960 IC operates between 2.7Vdc to 5.5Vdc input supply voltage and when in power down mode, consumption is less than 1µA while standby current is less than 120µA.

The TRF7961 supports ISO/IEC 15693, and ISO/IEC 18000-3 standards and TI's Tag-It portfolio. The TRF7960 supports the standards listed above plus the ISO/IEC 14443A/B standard and TI's contact less commerce portfolio. With a high level of integration, lower power consumption and a smaller footprint, both devices are available today from TI and its authorised distributors in the standard 32-pin QFN (IC to board) connection packages. A reference design and source code for an evaluation module, with TI's MSP430 ultra-low-power microcontroller, is available for easy evaluation of the TRF7960 family .

RFID - Year 2006 Performance

Despite some areas under performing, most of the RFID business is booming. Here IDTechEx has interviewed key companies in different vertical sectors and have presented their comments on the opportunity for RFID in those sectors.

Most of the RFID business is booming. Andrew Price RFID Manager at IATA, the airline trade association, enthuses, "In the next few years the air industry will be tagging an ever higher proportion of its two billion bags yearly and it will use RFID in other new applications as well." This is a global phenomenon, not least in government applications. Dr Jimmy Li, Deputy Director of the Initiative Office for Government RFID Applications at the Ministry of Economic Affairs Taiwan and Senior Advisor of the Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan says, "Government applications of RFID are now growing rapidly. We started five RFID projects in the government area this year and there are more to come next year."

Steve Georgevitch, Total Asset Visibility Program Manager of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems says, "The aerospace and defense industries are on a rapid RFID adoption path with substantial benefits anticipated in the next several years".

Martin Capper, President, Mark IV IVHS Division says, "Mark IV sees RFID as an explosive market particularly in the Transportation segment with the evolution from the existing electronic payment systems to new applications delivering safety and mobility for both individuals and commercial traffic. The emergence of DSRC at 5.9GHz will create the next paradigm shift in surface transportation."

There are also new markets opening up beyond transport. Dr Chang-Hun Lee of the National Information Society Agency, Korea says, "Ubiquitous Sensor Networks will be a huge RFID market in a few years."

RFID tagging of livestock is driven by ever wider legislation. For example, the European Community and New Zealand join the party in 2008-2010, creating a market for tagging sheep, goats, pigs and cows, the total demand for these two regions being over 150 million tags yearly at about $2 each in 2010 from almost none today. Add a big demand for systems to that figure. The largest bookseller in the Netherlands BGN is ordering several million tags yearly for its new scheme and its payback is so compelling that others will rapidly follow.

When it comes to the biggest RFID market - contactless smart cards - Don Davis, Editor of Card Technology says, "Big players are making major bets on contactless, and forcing competitors to catch up. They are issuing large numbers of contactless cards and fobs and, in Japan, adding contactless functionality to millions of mobile phones, giving many consumers the chance to pay with a wave."

Contactless cards are a huge success and contactless ticket sales are also taking off exponentially. The China National ID card and system is the biggest rollout but an even larger budget of at least $15 billion is planned for the UK National ID card. Then there is continued growth in secure access applications and the start of the process of converting over three billion financial cards from Visa, MasterCard, American Express and JCB to RFID. Eurosmart sees sales of these RFID financial cards doubling to 20 million in 2007. In the US alone, 150,000 readers have just been installed for these financial cards but that is only the beginning. RFID cards and tickets and RFID enabled mobile phones (Near Field Communication) increasingly provide payments, ticketing, and secure access. All three devices are seeing rapid growth.

The China National ID scheme will peak at a huge 300 million US $2.45 cards delivered in 2007. Card readers valued at $1.2 billion are being ordered to go with them. The global market for RFID cards and systems will pass $3 billion in 2008. The figure below shows the market for RFID cards, which is fully analysed, together with tickets and RFID phones, in the new IDTechEx report Contactless Smart Cards and Near Field Communication 2007-2017.

Value of global market for RFID cards 2007-2010 in millions of US dollars excluding the China ID card

Source: IDTechEx report Contactless Smart Cards and Near Field Communication 2007-2017

IDTechEx forecasts that sales of RFID tickets will rocket from 100 million in 2007 to 450 million in 2010. Others are even more bullish in their forecasts. Certainly, the national railway system in China uses three billion tickets yearly, so its recent order for hundreds of millions of RFID tickets is only a beginning.

All the experts quoted in this article will present at the sixth annual RFID Smart Labels USA and Active RFID & RTLS conference in Boston, February 21-22 2007 www.smartlabelsusa.com. This major conference will be attended by many companies that intend to place large orders for RFID.

Source:

Raghu Das, Idtechex

German Meat-Tracking Project Focuses on Lasers and RFID

A group of university researchers are developing a system designed to ensure the freshness of meat distributed throughout the supply chain.

Jan. 2, 2007—A few months ago, Germans were horrified when government authorities announced they had uncovered 110 tons of rotten meat at several wholesale warehouses in Bavaria. Some of this meat was more than four years out of date, and may have been exported to other European Union countries. The manager for one of the involved wholesalers hung himself as the scandal received widened coverage.

However, an RFID project funded by the federal government in Germany may help eliminate future abuses of this kind. Not long before the news erupted, five research institutes launched a project to develop an RFID-based system using laser beams to recognize and record meat freshness

The FreshScan project, funded with €3 million from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), is being coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Micro-integration (IZM) in Berlin, which focuses on assembly and packaging technologies. No commercial partners are participating at the current time.

Established in mid-2006, the three-year project FreshScan project is still in the conceptual phase. The participants are developing a two-component system. The first part consists of a semi-active RFID tag with temperature sensors to document the condition of meat, from slaughter to sale, and record temperatures on a continual basis. The second is an RFID reader integrated with an optical detector—a device utilizing a laser to analyze and record the meat's condition in the tag. "The reader measures the light spectrum in which chemical changes can be detected," says Rolf Thomasius, an IZM researcher involved in the project.

Other partners consist of the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut für Hoechstfrequenztechnik (FBH), which is developing the optical detector; the Federal Research Center for Nutrition and Food (BfEL), which is defining those chemicals and positions in the radio spectrum that should be monitored by the system; the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering Potsdam-Bornim (ATB), which is determining how best to read the signals and define the freshness parameters; and the Technical University of Berlin (TU), which is designing the software needed to run the device. In addition, two professors are studying the chemical makeup of meat samples as they age. Fraunhofer's IZM is coordinating the results of the research conducted by these partners, and is building a demonstration model.

To determine the meat's freshness, the system will use technology often found in telescopes or satellites. One potential technology researchers are testing is Raman spectroscopy. This involves pointing a laser beam at the meat and measuring the beam's absorption and reflection, which change as the meat's chemical properties (i.e., the freshness) change.

The processing site will tag the meat's packaging, and the sensor on the RFID tag will measure temperature, moisture and light incidence at different intervals, recording this information on the tag. This mobile "freshness scanner" will be used at different points to determine the meat's condition.

No vendors have yet been chosen for the project, and standards remain unclear at present. However, Thomasius says the tags used are likely to be 13.56 MHz and comply with an ISO standard. Additionally, the designers are working out the type of power on which the tags should rely. When the project is finished, the demonstration model will still need some more development before it can be brought to market.

"Our goal is to create a very close prototype at the end product, so that we can launch the system shortly after the research project ends," he says.

According to Thomasius, one focus of the project is to create a tag that is smaller and thinner than 2 millimeters and can last at least one year so it can be reused. Since the project is noncommercial at this point, researchers are not focusing on the cost of the components.

Source : RFID Journal